When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

  Then she got clean clothes from Dr. Hunter’s bedroom and the baby’s room — more fingerprint dust — and they looked as good as new. Not Reggie, Reggie was old, she had lived a lifetime in a day.

  When they came downstairs again, all the police in the house looked completely stunned at the sight of them. One of the forensic officers said, “Who are you?” and Dr. Hunter said, “Joanna Hunter,” and the forensic officer said, “What are you doing, this is a crime scene, you’re compromising it,” and Dr. Hunter said, “What crime scene?” and the policeman said, “A kidnapping,” and then looked as if he felt pretty stupid because the kidnap victim was sitting right in front of him saying to Reggie, “Do you want to put the kettle on?” and Reggie said, “And we’ll all have tea.”

  And then everyone wanted to ask her questions, of course, and Dr. Hunter just kept on saying, as polite as pie, “I’m really sorry, I don’t remember.” When they’d had tea, Reggie said, “Well, better be off, Dr. H. Things to do, people to see.” And then she said to all the police officers, “Bye, folks,” and hoisted her bag on her back as if it contained books or messages or anything really rather than two sets of bloodstained clothes.

  Great Expectations

  Jackson was waiting outside the hospital, collar hunched up against the cold. She ignored him and walked past, but he reached out and grabbed onto her hand. Her skin was dry and cold. She snatched her hand back and carried on walking. He caught up with her.

  “I’m sorry about your boy Marcus.”

  They sat in her car and he held her while she cried. When she finished crying, she shook him off as if he were a nuisance and blew her nose.

  “You know we found her?” Louise said. “Don’t you?”

  “Dr. Hunter? Yeah, I heard that. Reggie told me.”

  “How?”

  “She phoned me.”

  “You don’t have a phone.”

  “Yeah, that’s true.”

  “Aren’t you even going to try to lie?” she said. “I know you’ve been up to something, it’s written all over you. You’re a terrible liar.”

  What was he going to tell her? That he pulled the pen out of the guy’s eye, that he had put the knife into a household bin on the street minutes before it was collected by the refuse men. That he had set fire to a house and destroyed a crime scene and had been complicit in covering up a double murder? She was police and he used to be. There was a chasm between them now that could never be bridged because he could never tell her the truth. She was always going to be in his past, never in his future.

  “You should go home, Louise.”

  “So should you.”

  He caught a coach. He hadn’t thought of that before. It was surprisingly comfortable, an overnight express that handily deposited him at Heathrow before first light. His odyssey was, finally, over. He went and had a coffee and waited for his wife to reach earth.

  According to the arrivals board in Terminal 3, Flight VS 022 had landed at Heathrow twenty minutes ago. It took a while to decant a huge bird like an A-340 Airbus, and then, of course, there was the further ordeal of baggage reclaim to be undergone by the passengers, so Jackson had shifted into waiting gear, an unreflective Zenlike state he had learned to be comfortable in when he worked as a private detective, tutored by endless hours of sitting in a car waiting for missing husbands and unfaithful wives to cross his radar.

  The arrivals gate was crowded with people ready to welcome passengers off the flight. Jackson had never seen such an assortment of nationalities in one place, certainly not in such benign good humor, especially considering the early hour. A line of considerably less enthusiastic drivers and chauffeurs held the outer perimeter, corporate signs and handwritten names aloft. Technically speaking, Jackson belonged in the first group, but it was the latter band of brothers that he identified with.

  There had been a lull for several minutes and an edge of anticipation was growing in the crowd, anticipation that turned suddenly to excitement as the automatic doors opened with a hiss and the advance guard of passengers strode through — first-class men in suits with cabin baggage, heroically indifferent to the waiting crowds.

  “Have you come off the Washington flight?” Jackson checked with a harassed-looking man who mumbled an affirmative as if he couldn’t believe a complete stranger would address him at this time of the morning.

  A few minutes later and a steady flux of people began to disgorge from the plane and be absorbed into the arrivals concourse. After a while the flow slowed down until it was only exhausted-looking families with children and babies straggling through. Finally, the wheelchairs brought up the rear.

  There was no sign whatsoever of his wife.

  There were several explanations of course. Her luggage might have been lost and she was still filling out forms in the baggage hall. Or she had been stopped by Customs or Immigration or Passport Control, a check or a mistake. Jackson had once been held up for hours because the laminate on his battered passport had begun to lift. He waited another twenty minutes to see if Tessa would appear, no Buddhist-like patience this time for him, just sheepdog agitation.

  She must have missed the flight, he said to himself. She would have phoned or texted him. Perhaps Andrew Decker had read a cheery message from her on Jackson’s BlackBerry (Had to change my flight or Been bumped! Rebooked on next flight).

  Maybe he was wrong about what flight she was on, his brain had been scrambled by the train crash, “mince for brains,” Louise had said.

  He tried ringing Tessa’s mobile from a pay phone, but he had no credit card and soon ran out of change. Reggie’s money had been almost used up on the coach fare.

  Eventually he went looking for an airline official, and a woman (“Lesley”) who was dressed in a uniform that would have allowed her to drown in a vat of Heinz tomato soup without anyone noticing informed him that no one by the name of Tessa Webb was on the passenger manifest.

  “She missed the flight, then,” Jackson said.

  “She was never booked on the flight,” “Lesley” said, scrutinizing her computer screen. “Or on any flight. In fact, there’s no one by that name in our entire database.”

  Perhaps she’d got the carrier wrong, he had never seen her ticket, perhaps she’d been booked with British Airways, not Virgin. The BA woman didn’t seem keen to talk to him — could have been the bruises, he supposed, or the sling, or his general air of desperation, there were a lot of reasons for not engaging with him — but she did say that the next BA flight from Dulles was due to land in an hour. So he waited for that one as well. No Tessa. In fact, he waited all morning before giving up and catching the Heathrow Express to Paddington, from where he walked all the way to Covent Garden. After all, he didn’t have anything else to do.

  He used the last of Reggie’s money to buy a bag of croissants. He was looking forward to a cup of good coffee made in his industrial machine. He hadn’t had a good cup of coffee since he set off early on Wednesday morning.

  What he hadn’t considered, what now seemed entirely logical, was that Tessa had arrived already, on an earlier flight, or even yesterday, and would be completely baffled by his absence from their flat. He quite talked himself into this view of affairs and was whistling with optimism by the time he climbed the stairs to their little eyrie (“love nest,” he had called it once and she burst out laughing, at his sentimentality or the cliché, he didn’t know).

  He rapped loudly on the door. He didn’t have any keys, of course, but his wife was at home, what did he need keys for? She was sleeping off her jet lag. Sleeping soundly. Or she had popped out to buy a bag of croissants. Fresh coffee for her beloved, to bring back to their nest of love. The beams of their house were cedar and their rafters were of fir.

  Where the fuck was she?

  Unbeknownst to their downstairs neighbor, Jackson kept a spare key to their flat above the lintel of the neighbor’s front door. A thief might look there for a key, but he was unlikely to realize it was for a different door
. Thieves, generally speaking, were opportunistic and stupid. He thought of the Prius’s keys behind the tin of Clouded Pearl. It would have been a good name, in another life, for Joanna Hunter. An inscrutable Chinese life. She said she killed the two guys who were holding her in the house because they were intending to kill her and the baby, but he didn’t know that for sure. She would have got off on self-defense, he was pretty sure, but the house was a bloodbath, she would never have escaped the notoriety. For the rest of her life she would have been the woman who killed her kidnappers, and the baby would have been the son of that woman. He could see her point. She’d spent thirty years running from one nightmare only to crash headlong into another.

  It was with a sense of relief that he slipped the key into the lock. It turned and he was home. Finally.

  No sign of Tessa. No bag of fresh coffee on the counter. No croissants. Whither is thy beloved gone?

  He could smell it before he could see it. Not coffee, that was for sure. It had been there at least a day by the abattoir smell of it. Not an it, a guy. A gun fallen to the floor at his feet, a Russian number — Makarov, Tokarev, he couldn’t remember — there’d been a lot around in the Gulf, quite a few of the lads brought them home as trophies. Perhaps the guy was ex-army, took a clean way out and blew the top of his head off. No, not clean, the opposite of clean. Blood everywhere, brains, other stuff, he didn’t look too closely, didn’t want to contaminate the scene. He had destroyed one crime scene in the last twenty-four hours, he thought he should probably preserve this one.

  Given that most of his head was blown off, it was difficult for Jackson to tell whether or not he knew the guy. The suit looked familiar, looked a lot like the tired suit who had sat next to him on the train, just an average Joe. Stranger or not, why would someone choose to break in and kill themselves here? Jackson was fairly inured to the sight of dead bodies, he’d seen a fair few in his time. What he wasn’t accustomed to was finding them in his own home. Not broken in actually, no sign of doors or windows being forced.

  Gingerly, trying not to step in any blood, Jackson inched nearer the body and using his thumb and forefinger tweezered out a wallet from the dead guy’s inside pocket. Inside the wallet there were two familiar photographs and a driving license. He contemplated the photograph on it. He had never liked that picture, he didn’t take a good photo at the best of times but on his driving license he looked like a refugee from a war. He was tempted to probe further in the guy’s pockets but resisted. A driving license said it all — the guy’s name was Jackson Brodie.

  He thought about phoning Louise and telling her that Andrew Decker had finally stopped running, but in the end he just dialed 999.

  While he waited for new credit cards to be sent, he asked Josie to transfer money into his account online (“Now what have you done, Jackson?”). If he could have accessed his passport, he could have gone to the bank and withdrawn cash, but his passport was in the flat, and everything in the flat was off-limits to him until the police gave him the all clear. “Potential crime scene,” one of the investigating officers said. “We can’t be sure it was a suicide, sir.” “Yeah,” Jackson said. “I used to be a policeman.”

  Before contacting Josie he had phoned Julia, but she wasn’t interested in his predicament. Her sister, Amelia, had died in the operating theater on Wednesday. (“Complications,” she sobbed. “Trust Amelia.”)

  The money was enough to get him by for a few days. He’d checked into a cheap hotel in King’s Cross while the Covent Garden flat remained a crime scene, not that he was thinking of moving back. He couldn’t imagine putting his feet up on the sofa and popping a can of beer in the same room where someone had, literally, blown their brains out.

  The hotel was a dive. This time last year he was staying in Le Meurice with Marlee, Christmas shopping in Paris, wandering out in the evenings to gaze in the Christmas windows of Galeries Lafayette. Now he was staying in a fleapit in King’s Cross. How are the mighty fallen.

  On Tuesday morning he went to the British Museum.

  No one there had ever heard of anyone called Tessa Webb. “She’s a curator here,” he insisted. “Assyrian.” No Tessa Webb, no Tessa Brodie. No conference in Washington that anyone knew anything about.

  He called in a favor from a guy called Nick who until recently had worked for Bernie, an ex-coms tech guy from the Met. Bernie himself was away somewhere.

  Nick reported back that no Tessa Webb had ever been to St. Paul’s Girls’ School, nor to Keble College, Oxford. There was no National Insurance record for her, no driving license. He wondered what kind of a reception he would get if he went into a police station and reported his prodigal wife as a missing person. And how did you report someone as missing when they seemed never to have existed in the first place?

  The DI in charge of the case said, “They’ve held the autopsy, pathologist says he’s one hundred percent sure that Decker killed himself.”

  “In my flat?”

  “I guess he had to do it somewhere. He had your keys, your address. Maybe he’d started to identify with you in some way. We’ve no idea where he got the gun, but he’s been mixing with cons for the last thirty years, so it probably wasn’t that difficult.”

  On Wednesday he was allowed back into the Covent Garden flat. He retrieved his passport and went to the bank to draw money out and discovered that he didn’t have any. The same with his investments.

  “Boy, she’s one clever cookie, this so-called wife of yours,” Nick said admiringly. “She moved everything out of your accounts into untraceable ones. Slick, really slick.”

  Tessa gone, the money gone, Bernie gone. It had all been one big setup, right from that initial “chance” encounter on Regent Street. Between them they had designed her to appeal to him — the way she looked, the way she behaved, the things she said — and he had fallen like the biggest fool ever. It had been a perfect con and he had been the perfect mark.

  He was too tired even to rage. And after all, he had never earned the money in the first place, so now it had simply moved on to someone else who had never earned it.

  VI

  Christmas

  A Puppy Is Just for Christmas

  A Faithful Friend.” What did that mean? Did it refer to the contents of the basket — wicker, with a lid like a hamper, tied with a large red satin bow — or did it refer to the person who had left the basket on their doorstep? The words were written on a Christmas gift tag, one of those expensive glittery ones that were reproductions of Victorian Christmas scraps. The whole thing looked old-fashioned, you expected to lift the lid of the basket and find a feast inside — plum pudding and an enormous glazed pork pie, bottles of port and Madeira.

  Louise hadn’t expected a dog. A puppy, a tiny thing. Black and white. “Border collie,” Patrick said knowledgeably. “I had one as a boy. A sheepdog.”

  It was Patrick who had found the basket on the doorstep. It was Christmas Eve and they had been sitting quietly, listening to the radio, a peaceful, timeless scene of domesticity that belied their feelings. Louise was set aside from it even while she was part of it. Patrick was doing the Scotsman crossword while Louise converted the Christmas cards she hadn’t got round to sending into New Year greetings, Sorry this is late, been laid up with flu. It wasn’t true, but hey. Upstairs, Archie was shut in his room, on his computer, talking to his friends, unseasonal music seeping through the floor. Someone rang the bell and Patrick got up and went to the door.

  Did you see who it was?” she asked.

  “No,” Patrick said.

  “Nothing? What about a car? A car engine? You must have noticed something. It didn’t just drop out of nowhere, someone rang the bell.”

  “Take it easy, Louise. I’m not a suspect here. Perhaps the dog was meant for Archie.”

  “A dog? Archie?” How unlikely was that?

  It was him, she knew it was. “A faithful friend,” he had a streak of sticky sentimentality a mile wide. The whole thing, the basket, the message,
the ribbon. It was him.

  She ran out into the street, holding the puppy in her arms. She could feel the fast heartbeat against her own. Its roly-poly little body was solid in her hands at the same time as it weighed a feather. She stood in the middle of the road and willed Jackson to come back. But he didn’t.

  “Louise, come on in, it’s freezing.”

  She drove to Livingston on Christmas Day. Alison Needler had the Trinity house on the market and was looking for somewhere else to buy. “I expect it will go for a knockdown price,” she said. “Not many people want to live in a house where three people were murdered.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Louise said. “The Edinburgh property market’s pretty ruthless.”

  She had taken round a tree the week before because you could see that Alison wasn’t up to that kind of thing. She had taken presents as well, toys for the kids, anything that was plastic, noisy, and garish — nothing remotely tasteful or educational, she had been a kid herself once, she knew what they liked.

  Today she had brought with her the things people were supposed to have at Christmas — nuts, satsumas, dates — the kind of stuff nobody really ate. A bottle of malt, one of vodka. “Vodka,” Alison said. “My tipple of choice.” Now and then you saw a glimpse of another Alison, the one that predated her marriage to David Needler. She retrieved two glasses from the kitchen and said, “You’re a whisky drinker, aren’t you?” Louise put her hand over the glass and said, “No, you’re all right, I’ll just have an orange juice or something,” and Alison raised an inquiring eyebrow and said, “Because you’re pregnant?” and Louise hooted with laughter and said, “God, what are you, a witch? No, because I’m driving. What? What are you giving me that look for? Honest to God, hand on my heart, on the grave of my mother, I am not pregnant.” But hey.

  The door in her heart had been wedged open and she couldn’t shut it, no matter how hard she pushed against it. And she had tried as hard as she could, even got as far as an appointment at a clinic, but sometimes, once something has been opened, it can never be closed again. Not all boxes stay locked.