When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

  Marcus parked the car a couple of doors down from Hillview. No cars outside, no cars in the drive. No sign of life. No proof of it at all.

  “You can have the honors,” Louise said to Marcus when they got out of the car and he stepped forward and knocked smartly on the door.

  “Very professionally done,” Louise said. “You should be a policeman.”

  A big, deeply unattractive man in a white wife-beater vest opened the door and stared unwelcomingly at them. She could hear a racing commentary blaring from a television somewhere in the background. He had a can of lager in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He was a formidable cliché, Louise felt like congratulating him on his near-iconic status.

  “Good afternoon,” Marcus said pleasantly. “I wonder if you could help us?” He sounded like an evangelist doorstep-selling Good News and Bibles.

  “Unlikely,” the missing link said. Louise couldn’t tell if he was being insolent or just being English. Both, probably. Her warrant card itched in her bag, but they were in mufti, not here on official business.

  “I’m looking for a Mrs. Agnes Barker?” Marcus persisted pleasantly.

  “Who?” The man frowned at Marcus as if he’d started speaking in tongues.

  “Agnes Barker,” he repeated slowly. “This is the address we have for her.”

  “Well, you’re wrong.”

  Louise couldn’t help herself. She pulled her warrant card out and thrust it in his ugly face and said, “Shall we try that again? From the top — we’re looking for a Mrs. Agnes Barker.”

  “I don’t know,” he said truculently. “I rent. I’ll give you the number.”

  “Thank you.”

  The girl who answered the phone at the rental agency and who sounded about twelve years old readily admitted that they were handling the rental for Mrs. Barker’s solicitor without Louise even explaining who she was. “They have a power of attorney for her,” she said, which Louise translated as meaning that the aunt was gaga.

  “Mrs. Barker is incapacitated?”

  “She’s in Fernlea. It’s a nursing home.”

  “So she does exist,” Marcus said.

  Louise’s phone rang as Marcus was reprogramming the Sat Nav. Abbie Nash was saying, “Boss? Got something on the car rental, or rather got nothing. We’ve phoned round every car-hire place in Edinburgh. None of them rented a vehicle to a Joanna Hunter.”

  “Perhaps she never changed the name on her driving license when she married.”

  “Mason?” Abbie said. “Yep, tried that. Zilch on that too. But while we were on the phone, I thought I might as well run Decker’s name, just in case, you know, and — bingo. Decker hired a Renault Espace this morning. And this is interesting — he was with his daughter.”

  “He doesn’t have a daughter.”

  “That’s why it’s interesting.”

  “The plot thickens,” Marcus said happily when Louise relayed this information to him.

  Fernlea was everything Louise feared for herself. The high-backed chairs gathered in the lounge around the television, the smell of institutional cooking layered over a faint but prevalent scent of Izal. It didn’t matter that there was a notice board displaying activities for the residents (Carpet bowls) and outings (Harlow Carr Gardens, Harrogate, including lunch at Bettys!), it remained a place to send people whom nobody wanted. A place to die. Archie would send her somewhere like this when she was toothless and bald, wetting herself, forgetting her own son’s name. She wouldn’t blame him. Patrick wouldn’t look after her, he was a man, so statistically he was likely to be dead, despite his golf and his red wine and his swimming.

  She wasn’t coming here. She would step out of her life, she would walk out into a cold, cold night (“I may be some time”), lie down beneath a hedge, and go to sleep rather than come to a place like this. Or slit her wrists and wait, as composed as a Roman. Or get a gun — easy enough — and put it in her mouth as if it were a licorice stick and blow her brains out of the other side of her head. Part of her was almost looking forward to it. There was something to be said for dying before you ended up in incontinence pads, watching an endless loop of reruns of Friends. Gabrielle Mason, Patrick’s Samantha, Alison Needler’s sister, Debbie. Preserved in the amber of memory, forever young. Forever dead.

  In the reception area, Louise showed her warrant card and her politest smile and said, “Just need to have a word with Mrs. Barker,” to a heavy girl in a pink-and-white-gingham-check uniform that was too tight, revealing rippling rolls of fat trying to escape. Sausage in a skin. “Hayley,” her plastic name badge said. Hayley’s thin fair hair was scraped back into a scrunchie, leaving her moon face mercilessly exposed. She made cow eyes at Marcus, who politely ignored her.

  The girl struggled to liberate a bar of chocolate from a pocket in her uniform. She unwrapped it and offered a piece to Louise. The chocolate was flattened and slightly melted and Louise waved it away even though she wanted it. Marcus took a piece and the girl blushed. She reminded Louise of a sugar pig. She used to like sugar pigs. “Do you think she’ll be up to having a chat?” she said.

  “I doubt it,” the girl said.

  “Because she’s not lucid?”

  “Because she’s dead.”

  Yeah, Louise thought. Death did have a way of shutting you up. An Elderly Aunt, Exit stage right.

  “Recently?” Marcus asked.

  “A couple of weeks ago. Massive stroke,” the girl volunteered, popping the last piece of chocolate into her mouth.

  “Someone should tell her solicitor,” Louise said, more to herself than the girl. Come to that, someone should tell Neil Hunter. “Did she have family?”

  “I think there might have been a nephew or a niece, but they were, you know, what’s it called? Like strangled.”

  “Estranged?”

  “Yeah, that’s the word. Estranged.”

  She doesn’t exist. The aunt is no more,” Marcus said to Louise as they left Fernlea’s unhallowed halls behind. “The aunt has ceased to be, she is an ex-aunt. If the plot got any thicker, it would be solid, eh, boss?”

  “You drive, Scout,” Louise said generously. Her headache was beginning to make her feel sick.

  “So now what, boss?”

  “I haven’t got a scooby. Might buy some cheese. No, wait, get on the phone and tell someone to find out who visited Decker in prison in the last year. He walks away from a train crash and hires a bloody big car with a so called daughter. Find out who the daughter really is. Someone must be helping him.”

  “Unless he just picked the girl up. Unless he took her against her will.”

  “Jesus,” Louise said. “Don’t go there.”

  “Do you think Decker might have something to do with the aunt?” Marcus puzzled.

  “I don’t know who has anything to do with who anymore.”

  There was no aunt, that was at least one incontrovertible fact. So either Joanna Hunter had lied to her husband about her destination (“Must pop down to see poor old Aunt Agnes”) or he had lied to everybody else (“She’s gone to see a sick aunt”). And who was the most likely liar — Neil Hunter or the lovely Dr. Hunter? Actually, Louise wasn’t sure she knew the answer to that question. She suspected that if push came to shove, Joanna Hunter could dissemble with the best of them.

  She had run and hidden once, now she was doing it again. She must have been upset by Decker’s release. She was the same age as her mother when she was murdered, her baby was the same age as her brother. Might she do something stupid? To herself? To Decker? Had she nurtured revenge in her heart for thirty years and now wanted to execute justice? That was an outlandish idea, people didn’t do that. Louise would have done, she would have made dice of Decker’s bones, cat meat of his heart, pursued him to the end of time, but Louise wasn’t like other people. Joanna Hunter wasn’t like other people either, though, was she?

  They parked in the center of Hawes, and Louise got out and wandered over to a bridge and gazed down at the water.
She felt adrift, Louise Unbound. Joanna had walked out of her life with nothing (except the baby, which was everything) and disappeared. It was a trick that you might envy. Joanna Hunter, the great escapologist.

  “Boss?” Marcus said, appearing at her side. “Okay?”

  “Fine,” she said, using the universal Scottish word for every state of being from “I’m dying in anguish” to “I’m experiencing euphoric joy.” “Fine,” she said, “I’m fine.”

  And then they did what you do in places like this. They went to a café and had afternoon tea.

  Shall I be mother?” Marcus said, lifting a utilitarian brown teapot, all cozied up in something that looked like a bobble hat.

  “I’m sure you’ll be better in the role than me,” Louise said.

  She tossed down a couple of peracetamol and took a sip of the tan-colored tea that was strong enough to clean drains.

  “Time of the month,” she said when Marcus gave her an inquiring look. It wasn’t, but hey.

  “Of course,” he said, nodding solemnly. Oh, these new boys with their respect for women, what were they like? They weren’t like David Needler, they weren’t like Andrew Decker, that was for sure.

  Marcus had ordered a slice of fruitcake and it arrived with a large slab of Wensleydale cheese on it. (Cheese and cake, what was wrong with these people?)

  “Cheeese, Gromit,” he said. Sweet boy. Idiot boy, but nonetheless sweet.

  Louise ate a toasted tea cake to cushion the painkillers. It tasted doughy and stuck in her throat. Her phone rang — Reggie Chase. She groaned and let it go to voice mail but then changed her mind and dialed Reggie’s number — might as well try and calm her down. She should avoid telling her about the aunt, though, the girl would go into meltdown if Louise told her that the aunt was indeed sick, so sick that she was six feet under the soil. Reggie’s phone rang five times before it was answered. By Jackson.

  “Hello?” he said. “Hello?”

  Go figure, Louise thought. Didn’t it make sense that two of the most provoking people she could think of would somehow be together.

  It’s me,” she said. And then realized he might not know who me was, although she liked to think that he would. “Louise,” she added.

  “That’s amazing,” he said, and then the line went dead. What was amazing?

  “Poor reception probably, boss,” Marcus said. “Too many hills.”

  Louise’s phone rang again and she snapped it open, presuming it was Jackson. “What?”

  “Whoa,” Sandy Mathieson said. “Down, Shep. ‘Wee jaunt’ not going so well?”

  “No, it’s fine. Sorry. There is no aunt.”

  “Interesting. It’s like something out of Agatha Christie.”

  “Well, not really.”

  “Anyway, I was calling to say that the North Yorkshire traffic police have been on the phone.” It was true, the signal wasn’t good and Sandy’s voice came and went as he battled with the ether, but the triumphant tone of his message was loud and clear. “Decker’s been stopped on the A1, near Scotch Corner. They’re taking him to hospital in Darlington. You can be there in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, boss.”

  “Hospital?”

  “Some sort of accident.”

  Weird,” Marcus said when she told him to step on it. “It’s almost like he’s after you rather than Joanna Hunter.”

  “That’s not the really weird thing,” Louise said. “You wouldn’t believe the really weird thing.”

  “Try me, boss.”

  There’s something else, boss,” Sandy Mathieson said. “You’re not going to like it.”

  “You could say that about a lot of things.”

  “Wakefield got back to us. Decker wasn’t the most popular prisoner on the block. He only had three visitors in the last eighteen months. His mother, his mother’s parish priest — he converted to Catholicism while he was in there, spent a lot of time with the prison chaplain and so on — easy way of dealing with guilt, if you ask me.”

  “It’s the third visitor that’s going to kill me, isn’t it?” Louise said.

  “Yep. None other than one Dr. Joanna Hunter.”

  You’re joking me. She visited him? How many times?”

  “Just the once. A month before his release. She asked for permission, he gave it.”

  She never said, Louise thought. She had gone to see Joanna Hunter in her lovely home and sat in her lovely living room with the Christmas box and the winter honeysuckle with their lovely scent and she had told her that Andrew Decker had been released and Joanna Hunter said, “I thought it must be anytime now.” She didn’t say, Yes I know, I just popped down to see him a couple of weeks ago. She didn’t lie, she simply didn’t tell the truth. Why?

  “Victims visit prisoners, boss,” Marcus said. “Looking for explanations, remorse, trying to make sense of the crime.”

  “They don’t usually wait thirty years.”

  Joanna Hunter could run, she could shoot. She knew how to save lives and she knew how to take them. “There are no rules,” she had said to Louise last week in the lovely living room. “We just pretend there are.” What was she up to?

  Louise’s phone rang again. She let it ring for a long time, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know anything else.

  “Boss?” Marcus took his eyes off the road for a moment and gave her a hesitant glance. “Are you going to answer that?”

  “It’s always bad news.”

  “Not always.”

  A crescendo of phone calls, bound to end in a big dramatic finish. She sighed and answered.

  “Sorry, boss,” Abbie Nash said. “Nothing dramatic. We’ve chased down the calls, in and out, on Wednesday for Joanna Hunter.”

  “Start with the ones after she got home from work, after four o’clock.”

  “One from her husband, two from a Sheila Hayes, and the last one at nine thirty — same number that phoned on Thursday a couple of times and again yesterday morning, a mobile, registered to a Jackson Brodie, address in London.”

  Well, it would be, wouldn’t it?

  Arma Virumque Cano

  Reggie woke Jackson with a mug of tea and a plate of toast. The mug had written on it “Washed in the Blood of the Lamb,” and she said to him, “Not the mug, obviously, that was washed in Fairy Liquid.”

  He had been baffled last night by the fact that the house she had brought him to (in an incredibly expensive taxi) was a matter of yards from where the train crash had occurred, from where he had died and lived.

  “I don’t actually live here,” Reggie said.

  “Who does live here then?”

  “Ms. MacDonald, except that she doesn’t because she’s dead. Everyone’s dead.”

  “I’m not,” Jackson said. “You’re not.”

  This was the deal, he was going home, to London, and he was going to meet his wife off the plane, and on the way he would make a detour to check out some aunt that Reggie kept raving on about, an aunt who was in some way connected to Reggie’s missing doctor (Kidnapped!). When they found the aunt (whose very existence seemed to be in doubt), he would drive Reggie to the nearest train station and he would continue on home alone. Exactly how he was going to manage this he wasn’t sure, perhaps in stages, like a tired old dog.

  Reggie seemed to have an overheated imagination. This Dr. Hunter was probably just taking some time out from her life. Jackson wasn’t one to ignore a missing woman, but there were some of them who really didn’t want to be found. He had been sent to chase after a few of those in his days both in the police and as a private detective. Once, in the military, he had investigated the disappearance of a sergeant’s wife, chased her trail all the way to Hamburg, where he found her in a gay bar where the women all seemed to be dressed like extras in Cabaret. You could see she wasn’t intending to go back to married quarters in Rheindahlen anytime soon.

  Still, it would be on his conscience if he wasn’t sure, and he had enough women on his conscience without adding another one to the tally.r />
  They had gone to Reggie’s building society and withdrawn money. They had an agreement. Reggie gave up her life savings to him and he spent them. That’s what it felt like anyway. They also bought sandwiches, juice, a phone charger for her, and a road atlas. He no longer had confidence in his ability to negotiate the Bermuda Triangle that was Wensleydale.

  “You really are getting this money back,” he said, as she emptied her account in a Halifax on George Street. “I’m rich,” he added, something he didn’t usually admit to so readily.

  “Yeah, right,” she said, “and I’m the Queen of Whatever.”

  “Sheba?”

  “That too.”

  The only vehicle that the car-rental agency in Edinburgh had been able to provide Jackson with that he could drive one-handed — an automatic with the hand brake on the steering wheel — was a huge Renault Espace that you could have lived in if necessary. Espace — space. Plenty of that. “Are you needing child seats?” the middle-aged woman at the rental desk asked him. “Joy,” her name badge proclaimed, like a new-age message. “It’s a family car, really,” she said disapprovingly, as if they had failed to fulfill her criteria for being a family. Rarely had a woman been so misnamed at birth, Jackson thought.

  “We are a family,” Reggie said. The dog wagged its tail encouragingly. Jackson experienced a twinge of something that felt a lot like loss. A family man without a family. Tessa was ambivalent about children. “If it happens, it happens,” she said, although she was on the Pill, so obviously not as devil-may-care as she made out. He hadn’t really broached the subject with her, it seemed too personal a thing to ask. They might be married, but they hardly knew each other.