When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

She sat for a while longer, wondering if there was somewhere she could go that wasn’t home. Fife and all points north was just across the water. How far could she get before anyone noticed she was gone?

  Tribulation

  With hindsight, Reggie could see now that perhaps she should have mentioned her criminal relations to Jackson Brodie. If she’d warned him about her brother, for example, before inviting him to stay with her tonight, then he might not have walked into Ms. MacDonald’s living room ahead of her (while she locked the front door so they would be safe — irony, ha, et cetera) and found himself with a nasty-looking penknife nicking the skin covering his carotid artery at almost the exact spot where she had desperately felt for a pulse on the night of the train crash. Billy was on the other end of the knife.

  “Surprise!” Billy said flatly. “Who is this joker?” He pressed the knife deeper into Jackson’s neck. “What’s he doing here?”

  “Let him go,” Reggie said. There was no point in appealing to Billy’s better nature because he didn’t have one, but a person had to try. “He’s nobody to you.”

  To her surprise, and Jackson’s too, Billy did let go of him, shoving him to the floor, where he landed heavily as he only had one good arm to break his fall. Reggie was caught off guard by Billy grabbing her instead, putting his arm round her neck, almost crushing her windpipe. He used to do the same thing when they were little. Mum would say, “Give your little sister a kiss to say sorry,” because he was always having to apologize for some misdemeanor — snatching her doll, kicking over her Lego, biting (he was a terrible biter) — and he would sing out, “Soreee, Reggie,” and under cover of kissing her would half strangle her, and Mum would say, “Bad boy, Billy.” He looked wild-eyed, like the horses in the field did when Sadie got too close to them.

  Jackson struggled onto all fours and then got slowly to his feet. Billy stopped trying to choke Reggie and instead pressed the point of the knife against her neck and said to Jackson, “Don’t even think about doing anything.” She could feel the blade, cold and sharp on her skin. It was such a small knife, yet it could do so much damage to her.

  There were books all over the place. Jackson stood in the middle of the floor amongst the wreckage of Ms. MacDonald’s library, tensed and on his toes like a fighter ready to go into battle. She could see him thinking, weighing up possibilities, and she thought, Oh no, don’t.

  “I’m your sister, Billy,” she whispered to her brother. “Your own flesh and blood.” Better nature, appealing, no point, et cetera, but still you had to try.

  “He’s your brother?” Jackson said. “You little fucker,” he said to Billy. “It’s your job to look after your sister.”

  “Says you and whose Bible?” Billy said, but Reggie did feel his hold on her lessen a fraction.

  “Your friends have been looking for you,” she said to him.

  “What friends?” Billy said. “I don’t have any friends.” The sad thing was that he said it like he was proud of the fact.

  “You told them you were called Reggie, didn’t you?” Reggie said. “Told them you lived in Gorgie. They came and threatened me, they set fire to my home.”

  “Yeah, it’s a funny old world, as dear old Mum would have said.”

  “Don’t speak about Mum like that.” If she could just keep him talking, he would get bored, he had the lowest boredom threshold of any human being ever, and then he would leave and then Jackson wouldn’t do whatever it was he was about to do — go for Billy with his bare hands, by the look of it.

  And then she heard it. It was the primeval sound of a huge wolf roused from its ancient lair. The creature was standing in the doorway, its hackles raised, its fangs bared, a great growling, snarling noise in its savage chest.

  Reggie had forgotten about Sadie. The dog had raced up the stairs when they first came in the house, still in pursuit of Banjo’s ghostly trail.

  The dog rose on its haunches and with one leap was on Billy, grabbing on to his forearm and sinking its teeth in, so that Billy dropped the knife and started screaming at Reggie to get the dog off him. Reggie tried yelling, “Down, Sadie,” but it had no effect. Then Jackson did something you wouldn’t expect him to do: he punched the dog hard on the side of the head and its jaws slackened and it dropped to the floor like a sandbag. That was when things went a bit blurred for Reggie. Within a second, Jackson had Billy on the ground, kneeling on his kidneys while he shoved his good hand on the back of his neck.

  Billy’s arm was bleeding from the dog bite but not in a life-threatening way, not in a way that made Reggie want to rush to his help. Like any good first-aider, she treated the most injured party first, cradling Sadie’s big head in her lap and murmuring soothing words to her. Jackson got to his feet and said to Billy, “Don’t move. Not so much as a twitch.” Then he turned to Reggie and said, “Your brother, your call. Want me to phone the police?”

  They let Billy go. Gave him a second chance. Not really a second, more like a hundredth. “Blood is blood,” Reggie said. “After all.” Considering he used to be a policeman, Jackson didn’t seem to care one way or the other. Anyone could see, he said, “anyone except his sister, perhaps,” that “Billy boy” was hurtling at breakneck speed towards a bad end without any intervention from anyone. No, she assured him, his sister could see that too.

  “What was he after, anyway?” he asked and Reggie shrugged and said, “Oh, something and nothing. This and that. You need to go to bed,” she added. “It’s been a long day.”

  “Bit of an understatement,” he laughed.

  High Noon

  You need to go to bed,” Reggie said to him. “It’s been a long day.”

  “Bit of an understatement,” he said.

  He couldn’t sleep. The thin, damp pillow and even thinner, even damper sheets didn’t help. (Who was this Ms. MacDonald to have lived in such a bleak house?) He lay awake for a long time, listening to Reggie moving about in the living room. He couldn’t work out what she was doing but when he came down to investigate, he found her putting all the books back on the shelves, like a busy little nocturnal librarian. “Tidying up,” she said. “I’m not keeping you awake, am I?”

  He went back to bed and looked for something to read, but the only thing he could find in the bedroom was an ancient copy of Latin unseen translations. He hadn’t gone to the kind of school where they did Latin. After tossing and turning some more he went back down to look for some livelier reading matter and found Reggie fast asleep on the sofa with all the lights on. The dog was lying on the floor next to her, and when it heard Jackson, it woke up and stared intently at him. He lifted his hands in a no-threat gesture, a mime which did little to mollify the dog, who tracked Jackson with its eyes all the way round the room. You could hardly blame it for distrusting him, he’d given it a real whack to the head, but it seemed none the worse for the blow. Nonetheless, Jackson felt bad about hitting it, the dog was only doing what he would have done himself, after all.

  He couldn’t find a readable book in the whole place. Then he forgot about reading because he caught sight of Joanna Hunter’s handbag, sitting on what was probably a coffee table, but it was covered in so much crap that it could have been a Second World War tank and you wouldn’t have been able to tell.

  He was surprised that Louise hadn’t taken the bag into her custody. If it had been his case, he would have found it very interesting that a woman who for all intents and purposes had disappeared off the planet had left a bag full of information behind. He carefully opened the bag, watched all the time by the dog, lifted out the bulging Filofax, and leafed through it until he found what he was looking for. Joanna Hunter’s address.

  She had been found once, she would be found again. She wasn’t Joanna Hunter anymore. She wasn’t a GP or a wife, she wasn’t Reggie’s employer (“and friend”), she wasn’t the woman that Louise was concerned about. She was a little girl out in the dark, dirty and stained with her mother’s blood. She was a little girl who was fast asleep in the
middle of a field of wheat as men and dogs streamed unknowingly towards her, lighting their way with torches and moonlight.

  Later, when he was a policeman himself, he never went on a search that carried on after nightfall, and he realized that on that warm summer night in Devon, all of them — squaddies, policemen, members of the public — must have entered into some unspoken communal agreement to carry on looking for Joanna Mason even when it was impossible, so great was their sense of desperation.

  He covered Reggie with the tatty crocheted blanket that was on the back of the sofa. He was surprised at how paternal he felt towards her, he had thought he would only ever feel that way towards his own. He made a kind of farewell gesture to the dog and turned the lights out before tiptoeing down the hall to the front door.

  He had his hand on the latch when a voice said, “I hope you’re not thinking of going anywhere without me.” A little, insistent voice.

  “As if,” Jackson said.

  There was a Nissan Pathfinder parked in the drive of the Hunters’ house, behind Neil Hunter’s Range Rover.

  “I’ve seen it before,” Reggie said. “The guys who threatened Mr. Hunter were driving it.”

  “And here they are again.”

  “We should follow them,” Reggie said. “When they leave. If they leave.”

  “On foot?” Jackson said. “I don’t think that will work.” They had taken a taxi from Musselburgh and it had dropped them off at the end of the Hunters’ street. The place was deserted, not a light on, not a cat out.

  “Well,” Reggie said, “we can take Dr. Hunter’s car. It’s in the garage.”

  Jackson wondered if it was possible to hot-wire a Prius. Modern car technology was killing the handy criminal methods of car starting.

  “The spare key is in the garage,” Reggie said. “On a shelf, behind an old paint pot. Clouded Pearl.”

  “What?”

  “Clouded Pearl, it’s the name of the color. Dr. Hunter said no one would ever look there. I’ll get it.”

  He held back. It was a while since he’d tailed anyone in a car. First it had been criminals, then it was adulterous spouses. Now it was big men in bad cars. Or vice versa. They had crept across the lawn and into the garage only seconds before two guys came noisily out of the house and climbed into the Nissan. Jackson had come with the intention of interrogating Hunter, but he reckoned there might be a chance that the Nissan would lead them, if not to Dr. Hunter, then at least to something or somewhere interesting. Louise had proposed three theories on the garage forecourt — revenge, murder, and kidnap. He was going with kidnap. He should have kissed her. He had held back because they were both married, but maybe he was using that as an excuse, maybe he was just a coward. Anyway, she would probably have hit him if he’d tried.

  To drive, he removed his arm from the sling. Adrenaline was keeping the pain away; in fact, he felt remarkably energetic, thanks to a fresh dose from Australian Mike’s pharmaceutical cornucopia.

  “Don’t crash this car,” Reggie said.

  The dog in the backseat gave a soft whine. “She’s happy to be back in Dr. Hunter’s car and at the same time sad that Dr. Hunter isn’t in it.”

  “You speak Dog, do you?”

  “Yes.”

  Reggie had insisted they bring the dog. Jackson could feel its eyes boring into the back of his head and he wondered if it was planning on getting its own back on him.

  Reggie was reading road signs again. “Loanhead, Roslin, Auchendinny, Penicuik,” she said.

  “Okay,” Jackson said, “I can read.”

  “Just like old times,” she said.

  “You mean yesterday, which, since neither of us has slept, still counts as today?” He was getting really good at this time thing now.

  The road out of Edinburgh was quiet but not deserted, it was five o’clock on a winter morning but there were already people on the move, making their grudging way through the early-morning dark. A few supermarket lorries thundered along and a speeding motorcyclist hurtled past, eager to donate an organ in time for someone’s Christmas, but nothing happened to stop Jackson from keeping the Nissan in his sights.

  It became more difficult when it turned off the main drag. Jackson held back as much as he could, but he didn’t know these roads and he was worried the Nissan would take an unexpected turning and be gone before he could spot it. For a while he did think he’d lost it but then he saw taillights ahead, sitting high on the road, and guessed it was his target. They turned off onto what looked like a farm road, taillights bouncing along now. Jackson drove past the turning and then reversed back, turned off his lights, and followed from afar. There had been no sign at the turning to indicate where it led to, but it didn’t seem like the kind of road that went many places.

  After a couple of hundred yards, he parked the car at the entrance to a field. It wasn’t entirely hidden from view, but it wasn’t completely in the open either.

  “Right,” he said to Reggie. “You — and the dog — both stay here. I mean it, okay? I know that you are exactly the kind of person who will get out of this car the minute I’m out of sight, but I’m asking you to solemnly promise to stay here. Promise?”

  “Promise,” she said meekly.

  He had found a hefty Maglite in Joanna Hunter’s glove box. In an emergency it was an excellent weapon and he could have done with it himself, but he gave it to Reggie and said, “If anyone comes near you, hit them with this.”

  He got out of the Prius and listened. He heard the Nissan’s engine up ahead and then the engine stopped. He set off on foot.

  The Nissan was parked in front of a house, next to a nondescript Toyota, and the guys were climbing out, stiffly, as if they’d had a long night. Jackson watched as one of them knocked on the front door of the house before both of them went inside without waiting for an answer. After a few seconds he heard them yelling excitedly at each other as if they’d found something that they hadn’t been expecting — or hadn’t found something that they had been expecting (or indeed both) — and then they came racing out of the house and back into the Nissan, one of them on the phone to someone as he ran, and Jackson had only just enough time to throw himself into a dry ditch at the side of the road before they were haring back up the track towards the road. To his relief they drove straight past the Prius.

  He set off in the direction of the house, wondering what it was that had alarmed them so much. Not death, he hoped. There’d been enough of that for one week.

  A movement in the overgrown bushes that surrounded the house startled him. He thought it might be a fox or a badger, but a person, not an animal, stepped onto the path. There were enough lights on in the house to make out that it was a woman, and then she was suddenly illuminated, held like a moth in the beam of the Maglite in the unsteady hand of (a typically disobedient) Reggie, and Jackson could see that it was not just a woman but a woman with a child in her arms. She was veiled in blood from top to toe and had a knife clutched in her hand. Not so much a Madonna as a great, dangerous avenging angel.

  The dog barked with joy and ran towards her.

  “Dr. Hunter?” Jackson said, approaching cautiously.

  “Can you help me?” she said to him. More of a command than a request, as if a goddess had unexpectedly found herself on earth and was in sudden need of an acolyte. And Jackson had never been one to say no, either to goddesses or to requests for help.

  La Règle du Jeu

  Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving, sumer is i-cumin in, loude sing cuckoo, there was an old lady who swallowed a fly, Adam lay ybounden bounden in a bond and miles to go before I sleep, five little bluebirds hopping by the door. Run, run Joanna run. But she couldn’t run because she was tethered by the rope, like an animal. She thought of animals gnawing off a leg to escape from a trap and she had tried tearing at the rope with her teeth, but it was made from polypropylene and she couldn’t make any inroad on it.

  She knew that this was the dark place she had a
lways been destined to find again. Just because a terrible thing happened to you once didn’t mean it couldn’t happen again.

  The men spoke to her only when it was necessary but they didn’t seem bothered that she could see their faces. There was something military about them and she wondered if they were special forces. Mercenaries. She thought it best to talk to them even if they didn’t talk back. One was slightly shorter than the other and she called him Peter (I’m sorry I don’t know your name, do you mind if I call you Peter?). The slightly taller one she called John (How about John — that’s a good name?). She said, “Thank you, John,” when they gave her water or,“That’s very kind of you, Peter,” when they took away the pot to empty it.

  She guessed they were going to kill her eventually, when she’d served her purpose, whatever that was, but she was going to make it difficult for them because they would have to remember that she had been friendly to them, she had called them by their names, even if they weren’t their real ones, she had made them see that she was a person. And that they were people too.

  As well as water they gave her food, microwaved ready-meals that she would never have considered eating normally but that she looked forward to because she was very hungry. They gave her jars of baby food and cow’s milk in a cup, which she didn’t give to the baby but drank herself and breast-fed the baby instead. They gave her a pack of disposable nappies as well, the wrong size, and a bin-bag to put the soiled ones in, although they never emptied the bin-bag.

  The baby was very subdued, and she supposed it was because they’d given him a sedative. They’d given her an injection of something that made her head feel like wool for the first day, some kind of liquid benzodiazepine or maybe intravenous Valium. She had prepared the vein for them herself after they put a knife to the baby’s throat.

  They brought in some toys — a ball and a plastic box with different-shaped holes in the side. Lights came on and a bell rang if you posted the correct shapes in the holes. They were both secondhand and still had little handwritten price stickers on, as if they’d come from a charity shop. They were both soon bored with the toys. Mostly she played pat-a-cake with the baby and peekaboo and she sang and recited rhymes and jiggled the baby around to keep him amused, to keep him warm as well because there was no heating in the house. Hypothermia was a more immediate problem than boredom. They had given her a couple of blankets, old things, but it wasn’t enough. She wished she had her inhaler with her (she had to work hard to stay calm), she wished she had the baby’s comforter and that they were both wearing warmer clothes.