Big Sky

by Kate Atkinson

  Perhaps if he started his set they’d come to life a bit. “A man goes to the dentist,” he tried, but his voice sounded scratchy. Was it the dentist? Or was it a doctor? Press on. He was a trouper. This was a test. “And he says I think I’ve got a problem.” Silence. “And he says—” He was interrupted by a tremendous roar of laughter, it washed over him like balm. The laughter was followed by wild applause. Fuck me, Barclay thought, I haven’t even gotten to the punch line yet. The invisible audience continued clapping, some of them were on their feet, chanting his name, “Barclay! Barclay! Barclay!”

  Another wave of darkness passed over him, as if the curtain had closed. This time it didn’t open again. Barclay Jack couldn’t hear the applause anymore.

  Bunny was in the relatives’ room waiting for someone to come and have a word with him about what to do with Barclay Jack’s corpse. A comedian corpsing (as it were) indicated a bad joke—the kind that Harry might make—but Bunny was in no mood for levity. He had spent the entire evening chaperoning Barclay on his last journey. The ambulance, A&E, the relatives’ room, Bunny had endured them all. He appeared, by default, to have become Barclay Jack’s next of kin. It was not a role he would have chosen.

  Was he somehow duty-bound to arrange the funeral as well? Would anyone attend? Perhaps some third-rate entertainers from ancient history and the summer acts at the Palace, which was the same thing. The chorus girls would turn out in force, they were good for that kind of thing. They always brought in cake when it was someone’s birthday. No more birthdays for Barclay Jack.

  Bunny sighed with boredom. There was no one else in the relatives’ room, just Bunny, stuck with an electric kettle, a jar of instant coffee, and some well-thumbed magazines on a worn veneer coffee table—a couple of copies of Hello! from over a year ago and an old Sunday magazine color supplement. So far he’d drunk several cups of cheap coffee and gleaned a lot of unnecessary information about the Swedish royal family (he hadn’t even known that they had one), not to mention how to throw an “elegant summer barbecue.” Could a barbecue be elegant? Bunny couldn’t remember when anyone had last invited him to one, elegant or not.

  The ambulance and all the drama of A&E had seemed pointless to Bunny because he was pretty sure that Barclay had already left the planet when the St. John Ambulance bloke was applying the defibrillator pads to his gray-haired chest in the crowded corridor outside his dressing room. He’d been helped, but not much, by the ventriloquist, who unexpectedly identified himself as the Palace’s official first-aider. “Barclay!” he kept saying loudly to him. “Barclay! Barclay!” as if he was calling a dog to come back.

  Bunny scrolled idly through the photos on his phone. His only son had recently become a father. The new baby, Theo, had his own Instagram account, to which his daughter-in-law had reluctantly given Bunny access. There had been a christening, just before the start of the summer season. Everything was being done by the traditional book for this child—C of E service, full set of godparents, women in silly hats, the top tier of the wedding cake served up at the christening tea. His daughter-in-law was on high alert the whole time. Bunny suspected that she was afraid he would turn up in drag, the evil fairy at the cradle side, cursing her child with his questionable career choices. Of course he hadn’t, he’d worn his best Hugo Boss suit and a pair of brogues as polished as his almost bald skull, with not even a trace of Illamasqua foundation on his face.

  “It’s not that he’s a drag queen,” Bunny had overheard his daughter-in-law whisper to someone over the “quiche fingers.” “It’s that he’s such a crap drag queen.”

  “Mr. Shepherd?”

  “Yes?” Bunny jumped up as a nurse entered the room.

  “Would you like to sit with Mr. Jack for a while?”

  Bunny sighed heavily. This must be some kind of etiquette for the dead. More pointlessness. “Yes, sure,” he said.

  He was quietly contemplating Barclay’s yellowing sunken features, wondering how long he had to stay before he could make a polite escape, when his phone rang. Bunny looked at the caller ID. It said “Barclay Jack.” Bunny frowned. He contemplated Barclay again. He was quite silent, the sheet tucked up around his chin. For a moment Bunny wondered if it was some kind of prank, but then Barclay wasn’t a prankster. And the entire hospital wouldn’t collude in some kind of elaborate Candid Camera gag involving a corpse. Would it?

  Bunny stared intently at Barclay. No, he concluded, he was definitely dead. He put his phone cautiously to his ear and said, “Hello?” but no one answered. “The rest is silence,” Bunny said to Barclay’s corpse, for he was not a stranger to Shakespeare. You had to laugh, he supposed.

  Catch of the Day

  The Amethyst had been out since first light. She was a fishing boat with four Geordies on board. The men always chartered the Amethyst and the skipper treated them like old friends. They came two or three times a year and took their fishing seriously, although not so seriously that they hadn’t spent the previous evening in the Golden Ball getting plastered, giddily free of domestic duties. Their wives never came on these trips, they remained tethered to their homes further north, grateful to be avoiding the paralyzingly tedious subjects of fish, real ale, and the competing merits of the A1 and the Tyne Tunnel.

  It was set to be a beautiful morning. The sky was full of marshmallow clouds that promised to melt away soon. “Going to be a lovely day,” someone said, and there were murmurs of happy agreement. A flask of coffee was produced and the contentment settled in for the day.

  Their lines were baited with squid. They were looking for big fish—cod, ling, pollock, haddock, maybe even halibut if they were lucky.

  The cool morning air had almost succeeded in blowing away the effects of last night’s Sam Smith’s when the first of them felt a tug on his line. Something big and heavy, yet, oddly, it didn’t seem to be struggling to escape capture. When the fisherman peered into the water he could make out the flash of silvery scales. If it was a fish it was enormous, although it was lolling around in the water as if it were already dead. No, not scales, he realized. Sequins. Not a halibut or a haddock—a woman. Or a girl. He yelled for his friends and between them the four managed to hook the dead mermaid and haul her on deck.

  Hand of Glory

  Out at sea, in the wide mouth of the South Bay, Jackson could see a fishing boat making its way back into harbor. The sea was glassy and reflected the early-morning sun. It looked like a nice day to be out in a boat, he thought. He was taking Dido for her morning constitutional before driving back up the coast to his cottage. He had not gone home last night, instead he had slept in one of the several spare bedrooms at High Haven, having downed a couple of whiskies with Crystal once Harry and Candy had gone to bed. It had been more like medicine than alcohol for both of them, and even if he hadn’t had anything to drink he was still riding a tide of exhaustion that would have made climbing back in his car seem impossible. He had fallen asleep with Dido curled on the rug at the foot of the bed and woke to find her stretched out beside him, snoring peacefully in the vast white acreage of the emperor-size bed, her head on the pillow next to him. (When you last sleep with woman? With real woman?)

  While he drank his coffee, Crystal was drinking a dubious beverage the name of which sounded like something you would shout in a karate class. (Kombucha!) Martial arts was something she had taken up, she told him. (“Wing Chun. I know, sounds like something you’d order in a Chinese restaurant.”) So were the headbanging moves in the café at Flamborough Head on the Wing Chun curriculum? “Nah, I just wanted to kill the stupid bugger.”

  She cooked sausages for Dido, but all Jackson was offered was buckwheat porridge and almond milk, with the admonition that he should be watching himself at his age. “Thanks,” Jackson said.

  Crystal looked as though she was ready to breakfast on a leg ripped from a cow, but no, a “raw cacao ball” was the ultimate indulgence for her, apparently. It looked like shit to Jackson, but he kept that opinion to himself in cas
e he found his face mashed into the breakfast table, and instead he ate up his buckwheat porridge like a good boy.

  The elusive Tommy Holroyd had not appeared. Jackson was beginning to think Crystal’s husband was a figment of her imagination. He wondered what Tommy would have made of a strange man availing himself of his bed and his buckwheat porridge, like an unwanted Goldilocks.

  In tribute to the early-morning warmth, Crystal was wearing shorts and a vest top and flip-flops. Jackson could see her bra strap beneath the top and her fantastic legs were on full display. As was her fantastic black eye. “Here,” she said, dumping the mug of coffee in front of him. Jackson thought that he had never met a woman who was less interested in him.

  The Amazon queen sat down opposite him and said, “I’m not paying you, you know. You’ve done fuck all.”

  “Fair enough,” Jackson said.

  When he left High Haven after his workhouse breakfast, both Candy and Harry were still asleep upstairs, worn out by the previous day’s events. Harry had sketchily related their exploits before exhaustion got the better of him last night. They had been driven to a field, he said, and been locked in a trailer from which they had subsequently escaped, but Harry had no idea where the trailer was except that it seemed to be near the sea. After they had escaped, a man had given them a lift back to High Haven. He didn’t give his name but he was driving a silver car—at least, Harry thought it was silver, it was difficult to tell in the dark, and no, he didn’t know what make it was because he had been distressed to the point of collapsing at the time, he said, so could he please be left alone now to go to bed and sleep? And what did it matter anyway as the man had helped them, possibly even saved them. “He knew my name,” Harry added.

  “What do you mean?” Crystal said, frowning.

  “He said, ‘Hop in, Harry.’ I know that was weird and I’m sure you want to discuss it endlessly, but I really do have to go to bed now. Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry, Harry,” Crystal said, kissing him on the forehead. “You’re a hero. Night-night.”

  “Night. Who are you, by the way?” he said to Jackson.

  “Just a concerned bystander,” Jackson said. “I helped your stepmother look for you.”

  “You didn’t find him, though, did you?” Crystal said. “He found himself. Claims he’s a detective,” she said to Harry, “but he’s shit at detecting.”

  What do you make of that?” Jackson had asked Crystal once Harry had dragged himself up the stairs. “That the guy knew who he was?” (Was it a good thing or a bad thing? Tide in or tide out?)

  “I don’t make anything of it,” Crystal said. “I don’t intend to make anything of anything, and no, you can’t look at the footage from our CCTV, because your work here is done. They’ve made their point. My mouth is shut.” She made an exaggerated zipping motion on those perfect lips and said, “I’ll handle this on my own, thanks, so bugger off, Jackson Brodie.”

  After their failure to find Harry and Candy at Flamborough Head, Jackson had driven a defeated Crystal back to High Haven. “They might call on the house phone,” she said hopefully. “Or they might bring them back. If they’re trying to teach me a lesson they’ve succeeded, because, believe me, I don’t want anything happening to my kids.”

  It had been growing dark by the time they arrived at High Haven. Bats were flitting overhead like an aerial escort as they turned in to the driveway. A fanfare of lights along the drive came on automatically as the Toyota approached the house. It was an impressive place. Holroyd Haulage must be pretty successful, Jackson reckoned.

  He was just reiterating to Crystal that the only course open to her now was to go to the police, and she was just reiterating that he should fuck off, when a security light above the front door snapped on.

  Crystal gasped and Jackson said, “Oh, shit,” because they both saw that something had been deposited on the front doorstep. It looked like a bundle of clothing, but as they drew nearer it took on a human shape. Jackson’s heart dropped several floors and he thought, Oh, please, God, not a body. But then the figure stirred and resolved itself into two figures, one larger than the other. The larger figure stood up, blinking in the bright lights. Harry.

  Crystal was out of the car before Jackson had hit the brakes, running toward Harry and flinging her arms around him before scooping up Candy from the step.

  Jackson climbed stiffly out of the car. It had been a long day.

  He took the funicular up to the Esplanade to save Dido’s legs, although his knees were grateful as well. When they came out of the cabin at the top Jackson found the Collier film unit swarming everywhere. No sign of Julia, though, so he made his way to the unit base. He was keen to know when he was going to get his son back. Jackson had texted Nathan several times since he last saw him, asking him how he was. (How’s it going?) The incident with Harry had made him think about Nathan, and how he would feel if a malevolent stranger drove away with him. He had received just the one curt response to his query. Good. How come his son could spend hours chatting about nothing with his friends, but had no conversation whatsoever for his father? Where was Nathan, exactly? Still with his friend, presumably, although, infuriatingly, he had turned off the location services on his phone so that Jackson couldn’t track him. He was going to have to give him a lecture about how important it was.

  No sign of Julia at the unit base either. He finally tracked down a second AD, a woman Jackson had never come across before, who told him Julia wasn’t on set today. Really? Jackson thought. She had said she had no time off at all. “I expect she’s with Nathan,” he said and the AD said, “Who? No, I think she went off for the day. Rievaulx Abbey, I think she said. With Callum.”

  Callum?

  Jackson ate a welcome bacon roll in the dining bus. No sign of buckwheat porridge here. Breakfast was always the most popular meal on set, Julia told him. Dido received another sausage from the cook. “You should be watching yourself at your age,” he said to her.

  He was joined by the actor who played Collier—Matt/Sam/Max. Munching his way through an egg roll, the actor said, “In your expert opinion, what do you think is the best way to kill a dog? I’m supposed to shoot one in a scene soon, but I thought a bit of hand-to-hand combat would be more visceral. Or hand-to-paw, I suppose.”

  Jackson had had to kill a dog once, not a memory to dwell on, but he refrained from saying this—not in front of Dido, anyway. “Stick with the gun,” he said. “God knows, a gun’s visceral enough for anyone. Who’s this Callum bloke, by the way?” he added casually.

  “Julia’s boyfriend? He’s the new DOP. I think she likes him because he lights her really well.”

  Jackson digested this news along with the bacon roll.

  More irritating than the appearance of this unexpected person Callum in Julia’s life was the fact that she had gone with him to Rievaulx. The Terraces at Rievaulx were one of Jackson’s favorite places on earth, it was where he was going to live in the afterlife if there was one. (Unlikely, but he wasn’t against hedging his bets. “Ah, Pascal’s Wager,” Julia said mysteriously. Tide in/tide out, Jackson guessed.) In fact, he had introduced Julia to Rievaulx. And now she was introducing someone else to it. Jackson didn’t know about Pascal, but he would be willing to bet that she wouldn’t tell Callum they were canoodling in her former paramour’s favorite place.

  He was homeward bound, on Peasholm Road, just passing the entrance to the park, when the ice-cream van appeared, approaching from the opposite direction. A Bassani’s van, pink like the last one he had seen and still creakily pumping out the same music. If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise.

  It gave Jackson the chills and started him thinking about all the lost girls over the years. The ones lost in woods, on railway lines, in back alleys, in cellars, in parks, in ditches by the side of the road, in their own homes. So many places you could lose a girl. All the ones he hadn’t saved. There was a Patty Griffin song that he played sometimes, “Be Careful
” it was called. All the girls who’ve gone astray. It had the power to make him irreducibly melancholic.

  He hadn’t thought about his latest lost girl for at least twenty-four hours. The girl with the unicorn backpack. Where was she now? Home safe? Being berated by loving parents for having come back late and for losing her backpack? He hoped so, but his gut told him differently. In his (long) experience, your brain might mislead you, but your gut always told you the truth.

  He might have been remiss where the girl was concerned, but there were still people out there who needed him to protect and serve them, whether they liked it or not. The men who had snatched Harry and Candy hadn’t voluntarily released them, so what was to stop them going after one or both of them again? Crystal might have said that those perfect lips were zipped, but the kidnappers had no way of knowing that. Should he let sleeping dogs lie? Were they sleeping or were they prowling around waiting to pounce again? His own sleeping dog was in a post-sausage slumber on the back seat and had no opinion on the matter.

  He sighed and took the turning for High Haven. He was the shepherd, he was the sheriff. The Lone Ranger. Or Tonto, perhaps. (“You know tonto is Spanish for ‘stupid,’ don’t you?” Julia said.) He might be shit at being the shepherd, but sometimes he was all there was. “Heigh-ho, Silver,” he murmured to the Toyota.

  Women’s Work

  Ronnie and Reggie stayed the night at the hospital, in the small side ward where the girl they had found had been berthed. Someone ought to keep guard over her and no else seemed to be available. In fact, they were having a hard time garnering any kind of police concern about her, even though she had been beaten up and had heroin in her system, according to the doctor.

  The duty sergeant had almost laughed when they phoned in last night. They were too “resource poor,” he said, to come out and interview the girl, and they would just have to wait until the morning like everyone else.