Big Sky

by Kate Atkinson

  Jackson had an uncomfortable vision of himself on the mortuary slab with Julia weighing his heart in her hand. Healthy male. No sign of heart problems. According to that seafront clairvoyant, his future was in his hands. But it wasn’t, it was in Vince Ives’s hands.

  “Sorry,” Vince said, lowering the arm that held the gun, having the grace to look shamefaced. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “That’s okay, Vince,” Jackson said. Keep the guy calm, keep him focused. Get the gun off him.

  “It’s a mess,” Vince said.

  “I know, but it’ll be all right,” Jackson mollified. “You can come back from this” (a Collier cliché), “you just need to put the gun down.” He was searching his memory for a suitable country lyric or even another helpful phrase from Collier, but Vince said impatiently, “No, not me, I’m not the mess, I mean this place. What’s happening here.”

  “What is happening here?”

  “See for yourself.”

  Vince conducted a tour of the downstairs for Jackson’s benefit—the cell-like rooms, the stained mattresses, the fetid atmosphere of despair. Vince seemed detached, like an impartial real estate agent. Jackson suspected he was in shock.

  The normally placid Dido, who had accompanied Jackson inside Silver Birches—dogs die in hot Toyotas, and so on—was twitching like an agitated sniffer dog. He decided to tie her up in the reception area. She’d seen enough, and whatever was happening here wasn’t her business.

  When he returned to Vince, he found him standing in one of the rooms, lost in thought. There had been a dead girl here yesterday, he said. No girl now, dead or alive. No girls at all. Jackson began to wonder if this whole thing had been produced by Vince’s overwrought imagination.

  “Maybe they’ve moved them,” Vince said. “One of the girls escaped, they’ll be worried that she’s able to identify this place. They don’t keep the girls here for long anyway, apparently.”

  They? Anderson Price Associates, Vince explained. There was no Anderson and no Price, it was run by people he knew. “Friends,” he added grimly. “Tommy and Andy and Steve.”

  Sounded like children’s TV presenters, Jackson thought, but then the antennae on his little gray cells twitched. “That wouldn’t be Tommy Holroyd, would it? Crystal’s husband?”

  “Yeah,” Vince said. “Crystal deserves better. Do you know her? Have you met her?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Tommy Holroyd, Andy Bragg, Steve Mellors,” Vince said. “The Three Musketeers,” he added sarcastically.

  “Steve Mellors? Stephen Mellors? A solicitor in Leeds?”

  “You know him as well?” Vince said suspiciously. “You’re not in cahoots with them, are you?” Jackson noticed him tightening his grip on the gun. Was it just for show? The man had been in the Signals, for heaven’s sake, had he ever fired a gun in combat? More to the point, did he really have the nerve to shoot someone in cold blood?

  “Christ, no, Vince,” he said. “Relax, will you? It’s just a coincidence. I do some work for him occasionally. Fact-checking.” He wasn’t entirely surprised. There was a narrow line between the wrong and right side of the law and Stephen Mellors was the type who managed to straddle it successfully.

  “Pretty big coincidence,” Vince muttered.

  It was, wasn’t it? Jackson thought. Even in a lifetime of coincidences this one was outlandish. He wondered if he had somehow been unwittingly pulled into this hellish conspiracy. But then he never needed to look for trouble, as Julia frequently reminded him, trouble would always find him.

  “And where are they now?” he asked Vince. “Tommy and Andy and Steve?”

  “I don’t know where Steve is. I just saw Tommy leaving. Andy’s somewhere in the building. He can’t have gotten far. I shot him.”

  “You shot him?”

  “I did.”

  Not for show, then. “I’d feel much better if you put the gun down, Vince.”

  “I’d feel much better if I didn’t, to be honest.”

  As they walked along the corridor Jackson noticed occasional smears of blood on the walls, and as they started up the stairs he saw a bloody handprint on the wall, hardly a good augur. In Marlee’s nursery class the children had made a tree that had been hung on the wall. The leaves were the prints from their hands, dipped in different shades of green paint and with their names written on them by their teacher, Miss Carter. “The Tree of Life” she had titled it. He wondered if Marlee remembered that. She was part of his tree of life. And now she was starting her own tree, putting down roots, growing branches. He sensed himself getting lost in a tangled forest of metaphors.

  All thoughts of trees and metaphors disappeared abruptly when Vince opened the door to one of the rooms. And there they were. Women. Jackson counted seven, in various states of disrepair, doped up to the eyeballs and handcuffed with plastic ties. He could detect the ferrous smell of fresh blood. The place felt like an anteroom to an abattoir.

  “I’m going to phone the emergency services, is that okay, Vince?” he said. Best to let a man with a gun think he was in charge. Because, let’s face it, he was.

  “Not the police, though,” Vince said.

  “The police are what’s needed, Vince. I can count at least three major crimes taking place here, and that’s without the guy you shot.” Jackson felt as if he’d spent the last twenty-four hours trying—and failing—to persuade people to reach out and grasp the hand at the end of the long arm of the law.

  “No police,” Vince said calmly. “I’ll see to it.”

  See to it? What did that mean? Jackson wondered as he pushed nine three times on his phone. “No signal in here,” he said to Vince, holding up his phone as if to demonstrate. “I’m just stepping out into the corridor, okay?” Jackson wasn’t about to let the emergency services walk into an ambush. Vince had already shot one person, who was to say he wasn’t prepared to shoot everyone? To go for the classic murder/suicide blaze-of-fury ending and take everyone down with him like a kamikaze pilot.

  Cupping the phone in his hands to muffle the conversation, Jackson recited his old warrant number to the dispatcher, hoping it wouldn’t be checked. It was a crime to impersonate a policeman, but in the hierarchy of crimes much greater ones were being committed all around him. Unfortunately the dispatcher’s voice at the other end started to break up and wander off into the ether, and the game was up when Vince appeared at his side. “You didn’t ask for the police, did you?” he asked, motioning Jackson back into the room with the gun as if he was directing traffic.

  “No,” Jackson said truthfully, “I didn’t.”

  Jackson went around with his trusty Leatherman, slicing through the plastic ties. The girls were nervous of him, and of the knife, and he kept saying, “It’s okay, I’m a policeman,” which seemed more positive than the past tense, although it hardly made any difference to them as English wasn’t their first language. His tone of voice seemed to soothe them eventually. He checked for injuries. Mostly bruises, the kind you got from being beaten. Jackson thought of Crystal Holroyd and the blows she had taken yesterday. It still made him wince to remember it. He couldn’t imagine that she knew about this place, that she knew how Tommy made the money that allowed her to live in a style that she had not been accustomed to before she met him. He liked to think that she was one of the righteous.

  Vince holstered his weapon casually, tucking it into the back of his belt while he gave the girls water and murmured, “You’re safe now, don’t be afraid.” Jackson eyed up the gun. How quick on the draw would Vince be? he wondered. Would he really shoot him? Watching the way he gently tended to the girls, it seemed unlikely, but was he prepared to take that risk?

  They worked like battlefield medics—swift but steady. The room did bear a resemblance to a war zone. One more battle in the war against women.

  A tale as old as time. Disney, Jackson thought. He had watched Beauty and the Beast with Marlee on a Blockbuster video when she was little. (Video! Dear God, like s
omething from the ark.) And now she had met her Prince Charming, was about to bite into the happy-ever-after. The poisoned apple. (Why can’t you be pleased for me, Dad? What the hell is wrong with you?) Marlee was twenty-three, she could easily be one of the girls held captive in Silver Birches. These girls all had stories—lives, not stories—yet here they’d been reduced to anonymous commodities. The thought made his heart hurt. For them. For all the girls. All the daughters.

  Jackson had one ear out for the sound of approaching sirens, but could hear nothing but silence. He kept finding himself kneeling in blood, sticky, fresh stuff that didn’t belong to the girls. The man Vince had shot, presumably. Andy. Tommy and Andy and Steve. The gang of three.

  “Right,” Vince said, standing up suddenly. “I’d better go and find that bastard Andy and finish him off.”

  As it turned out, Vince didn’t need to go and look for Andy as moments later Andy found them, staggering into the room before collapsing against a wall. He was clearly the source of all the blood.

  “Help me,” he said. “I’m fucking dying.” Jackson told him that an ambulance was on the way, but when he made a move toward him to help him Vince pointed the gun at him again and said, “Don’t. Just don’t. Let the bastard bleed to death.”

  Andy? Vince? What the hell is going on?”

  Stephen Mellors. Last seen by Jackson in a bar in Leeds, eyeing up Tatiana’s assets. Tommy, Andy, and Steve. Who would be next to enter the room? Tatiana herself, perhaps? Accompanied by her father, the clown? Because this was clearly a circus. Stephen Mellors had, like Vince, come armed to the party, holding a baseball bat in his hands, like any common thug. He suddenly noticed Jackson and frowned at him. “Brodie? What are—?”

  “This isn’t a fucking tea party, Steve,” Vince interrupted. “We’re not here to introduce ourselves to each other. We’re not about to play pass the parcel and eat ice cream and jelly. Over there,” he said, gesturing with the gun. “Go and sit on the floor, in the corner, old chum,” he sneered.

  “Calm down, Vince,” Stephen Mellors said, which, as everyone knows, is just about the worst thing you can say to someone waving a gun around. “Okay, okay,” he said when Vince steadied his aim on him. He sat down resentfully on the floor.

  “And put the stupid bat down,” Vince said. “Good. Now kick it over to me.”

  “Dying here,” Andy muttered, “in case anyone hasn’t noticed.”

  “You’re just winged,” Vince said. “Stop making such a fuss.”

  “I need extreme unction.”

  “No, you don’t. Whatever that is.”

  Jackson, lapsed Catholic that he was, wondered about explaining the term, and then thought better of it as Vince was now pointing the Browning steadily at Stephen Mellors’s head, so it looked as if he might be the one who was about to need extreme unction. “Don’t shoot him,” he said. “You don’t want to do this, Vince.” (Another frequent Collier aphorism.)

  “Yes, I do.”

  “The police are on their way.”

  “You’re lying. Doesn’t matter now anyway. You know,” he said conversationally—they might have been two blokes in the pub—“when I was in the Army there were some guys who said they’d rather die in combat—go down fighting—than live out their four score and ten. Trudge through it,” he added with a little laugh. “And I never understood how they could think like that.”

  “And now you do?”

  “Yeah. I bet that’s how you think, too.”

  “No,” Jackson said. “Once upon a time maybe, but not now. Personally I’m happy to trudge to the end. I’d like to meet my grandchildren. Put the gun down, Vince.” Keep him talking, Jackson thought. People who were talking weren’t shooting. “Think about your daughter, Vince—Ashley, isn’t it? The police will come with a SWAT team. They might shoot you, and if they shoot they’ll shoot to kill.”

  “The police aren’t coming,” Vince said.

  Seemed he was wrong. Seemed they were already here. Two young women entered the room, hardly a SWAT team, but nevertheless it was now a proper three-ring circus.

  “DC Ronnie Dibicki,” one of them said, holding up her warrant card. “I’m asking you to put that gun down, sir, before anyone gets hurt.”

  “I’m hurt,” Andy Bragg said.

  Jackson was impressed by their joint steadfastness in the face of a loaded weapon. They were brave, he thought. Men fell down. Women stood up.

  “This man needs urgent medical attention,” one of the DCs said, kneeling down next to Andy Bragg.

  She was about to speak into her radio but Vince said, “Leave it. Stand up, get away from him.”

  “It’s okay, an ambulance is on the way,” Jackson said. Several ambulances, he hoped.

  “Shut up,” Vince said, “all of you.” Not surprisingly he was growing increasingly edgy. He was wrangling a lot of people now with that gun, including two police officers, both of whom seemed to know him already. (Mr. Ives, do you remember me? Ronnie Dibicki.)

  “Can someone explain what’s happening here? Mr. Brodie?” one of them said to Jackson.

  “Beyond the obvious? No.” He paused, registering the “Mr. Brodie.” “How do you know my name?” he puzzled.

  “Mr. Brodie, it’s me. Reggie. Reggie Chase.”

  “Reggie?” Worlds were colliding all over the place. Jackson thought he might actually have gone mad. Or that he was hallucinating. Or that this was an alternative version of reality. Or all three. (Reggie! Little Reggie Chase!)

  “Arrest him,” Vince said to her, pointing the gun at Steve Mellors. “He’s called Stephen Mellors and he’s the mastermind behind all this.” Andy Bragg grunted something that seemed to be disagreement about the word “mastermind.”

  “Because if you don’t arrest him, I’ll shoot him,” Vince said. He moved closer to Mellors and said “Arrest him” again, the gun now inches away from Mellors’s head. “I promise I’ll shoot him if you don’t arrest him. It’s one or the other, you choose. I’d rather shoot him, but I’ll settle for arrest.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” Mellors said to no one in particular. Jackson seemed to be the only one who saw Ronnie Dibicki slip out of the room while everyone’s attention was on the gun and its proximity to Stephen Mellors’s head.

  “Stephen Mellors, I am arresting you on suspicion of…” Reggie said. She glanced at Jackson and he said, “Try GBH for starters. I expect you can throw in the Modern Slavery Act later. As well as a few other choice things.”

  “Stephen Mellors,” Reggie said, throwing Jackson a black look, “I am arresting you on suspicion of assault causing grievous bodily harm. You do not have to say anything but it may harm your defense if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”

  And then one of the girls suddenly stumbled to her feet and pointed at Stephen Mellors like a character accusing someone in a melodrama. “Mark Price,” she said. “You’re Mark Price.”

  Haulage

  She was dreaming about plums. Just a few days ago they had sat knee to knee—Nadja and Katja and their mother—on the small balcony of their mother’s apartment, eating plums from an old plastic bowl. The plums were the color of bruises. Big purple bruises.

  They had picked the plums on a visit to their grandfather’s farm. Not really a farm, more of a smallholding, but he grew everything. Plums, apples, cherries. Cucumbers, tomatoes, cabbages. When they were little they used to help him make his sauerkraut, squeezing the salt into it until the leaves went limp. He kept a big wooden tub of it on his porch. A thick mat of mold on the top kept it from freezing in the winter. It used to disgust Katja. She never had a strong stomach—their mother said she was a fussy eater, but she was mostly just obsessed with her weight.

  Katja didn’t like to go shooting with their grandfather either. It wasn’t so much the killing that she didn’t like, it was the skinning and gutting afterward. Their grandfather could strip a rabbit of its
fur in seconds and then slit it open and let its steaming innards slip out. His dogs devoured the entrails before they even hit the ground. Nadja was his willing apprentice, following him through the woods and fields, stalking the rabbits.

  Foxes too, although Katja said if he didn’t shoot the foxes the foxes would eat the rabbits and then no one would have to go about like cowboys shooting everything in sight.

  Nadja was a good shot. Only this weekend she had bagged a fox, a big brown dog with a huge brush. Her grandfather nailed the best skins onto the door of his woodshed. “Trophies,” he said.

  Nadja was his favorite. “My strong girl,” he called her. Katja didn’t care. She never cared about anything much except skating. Nadja gave up ballet so their mother could afford all the expense. Nadja wasn’t resentful—perhaps it was a relief in a way because she no longer had to keep proving herself. She loved her sister. They were close—best friends. She went to all Katja’s competitions. Hated it when she lost or when she fell, because she could be beautiful on the ice. When she had to give it up it hurt Nadja almost as much as it hurt Katja.

  They’d picked all the plums, scavenging even the last of the small, imperfect ones. Their grandfather made his own slivovitz. It could take the top of your head off. They should take a bottle to London with them, he said. Show the English what a real drink was. He had never forgiven Churchill for his betrayal of the Poles after the war. Katja couldn’t care less about history. “Modern times now, Grandpa,” she said.