When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

  Their mother was cut down where she stood, the great silver knife carving through her heart as if it were slicing butcher’s meat. She was thirty-six years old.

  He must have stabbed Jessica too before she ran off, because there was a trail of blood, a path that led them to her, although not at first, because the field of wheat had closed around her like a golden blanket. She was lying with her arms around the body of the dog and their blood had mingled and soaked into the dry earth, feeding the grain, like a sacrifice to the harvest. Joseph died where he was, strapped into the pushchair. Joanna liked to think that he never woke up, but she didn’t know.

  And Joanna. Joanna obeyed her mother when she screamed at her. “Run, Joanna, run,” she said, and Joanna ran into the field and was lost in the wheat.

  Later, when it was dark, other dogs came and found her. A stranger lifted her up and carried her away. “Not a scratch on her,” she heard a voice say. The stars and the moon were bright in the cold black sky above her head.

  Of course, she should have taken Joseph with her, she should have snatched him from the buggy, or run with the buggy (Jessica would have). It didn’t matter that Joanna was only six years old, that she would never have managed running with the buggy and that the man would have caught her in seconds, that wasn’t the point. It would have been better to have tried to save the baby and been killed than not trying and living. It would have been better to have died with Jessica and her mother rather than being left behind without them. But she never thought about any of that, she just did as she was told.

  “Run, Joanna, run,” her mother commanded. So she did.

  It was funny, but now, thirty years later, the thing that drove her to distraction was that she couldn’t remember what the dog was called. And there was no one left to ask.

  II

  Today

  Flesh and Blood

  The green ran the whole length of the village and was bisected by a narrow road. The primary school looked over the village green. The green wasn’t square, as he’d first imagined, nor did it have a duck pond, which was something else he had imagined. You would think, coming from the same county, he would know this countryside, but it was alien corn. His knowledge of the Yorkshire Dales was secondhand, garnered from TV and films — the occasional glimpse of Emmerdale, a semiconscious night on the sofa, watching Calendar Girls on cable.

  It was quiet today, a Wednesday morning at the beginning of December. A Christmas tree had been erected on the green, but it was still as nature intended, undecorated and unlit.

  The last time (the first time) he had come here to scope out the village, it had been a Sunday afternoon, height of the midsummer season, and the place had been humming, tourists picnicking on the grass, small children racing around, old people sitting on benches, everyone eating ice creams. There was a kind of sandpit at one end, where people — natives, not tourists — were playing what he thought might be quoits, throwing big iron rings as heavy as horseshoes. He hadn’t realized people still did things like that. It was bizarre. It was medieval. There were still stocks on the green, by the market cross, and — according to a guidebook he had bought — a “bull ring.” He’d thought of the Birmingham shopping center of that name until he’d read on and discovered its purpose was bullbaiting. He presumed (he hoped) that the stocks and the bull ring were historic — for the tourists — and not still in use. The village was a place to which people drove in their cars in order to get out and walk. He never did that. If he walked, he started from where he was.

  He hid behind a copy of the Darlington & Stockton Times and studied the small ads for funeral homes and decorators and used cars. He thought it would be a less conspicuous read than a national newspaper, although he had bought it in Hawes rather than in the village shop, where he might have drawn too much attention to himself. These people had a well-developed radar for the wrong kind of stranger. They probably burned a wicker man every summer.

  Last time he’d been driving a flashy car, now he blended in better, driving a mud-spattered Discovery rental and wearing hiking boots and a fleece-lined North Face jacket, with an OS guide in a plastic wallet hanging round his neck that he’d also bought in Hawes. If he could have got hold of one, he would have borrowed a dog, and then he would have looked like a clone of every other visitor. You should be able to rent dogs. Now there was a gap in the market.

  He had driven the rental from the station. He would have driven all the way (in his flashy car), but when he had got into the driving seat and switched on the engine, he found his car was completely dead. Something mysterious, like electronics, he supposed. Now it was being nursed in a garage in Walthamstow by a Polish guy called Emil who had access (a nice euphemism) to genuine BMW parts at half the price of an official supplier.

  He checked his watch, a gold Breitling, an expensive present. Quality time. He liked male paraphernalia — cars, knives, gadgets, watches — but he wasn’t sure he would have laid out so much money on a watch. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” she said and smiled when she gave it to him.

  “Oh, fucking hurry up, would you,” he muttered and banged his head off the steering wheel, but gently in case he attracted the attention of a passing local. Despite the disguise, he knew there might be a limit to how long you could hang about in a small place like this without someone beginning to ask questions. He sighed and looked at his watch. He’d give it another ten minutes.

  After nine minutes and thirty seconds (he was counting — what else was there to do? — watching the watch), a vanguard of two boys and two girls ran out of the door of the school. They were carrying football nets and in a well-practiced maneuvre erected them on the green. The green seemed to serve as a school playground. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be educated in a school like this. His primary school had been an underfunded, overpopulated sinkhole where social Darwinism applied at every turn. Survival of the fastest. And that was the good part of his education. His proper education, where he had actually sat in a classroom and learned something, had been provided courtesy of the army.

  A stream of children, dressed in PE kit, poured out of the school and spread over the green like a delta. Two teachers followed and started dishing out footballs from a basket. He counted the children as they came out, all twenty-seven of them. The little ones came out last.

  Then came what he was waiting for — the playschool kids. They gathered every Wednesday and Friday afternoon in a little extension at the back of the school. Nathan was one of the tiniest, tottering along, holding on to the hand of a much older girl. Nat. Small like a gnat. He was bundled into some kind of all-in-one snowsuit. He had dark eyes and black curls that belonged incontrovertibly to his mother. A little snub nose. It was safe, Nathan’s mother wasn’t here, she was visiting her sister, who had breast cancer. No one here knew him. Stranger in a strange land. There was no sign of Mr. Arty-Farty. The False Dad.

  He got out of the car, stretched his legs, consulted his map. Looked around as if he’d just arrived. He could hear the waterfall. It was out of sight of the village but within hearing of it. Sketched by Turner, according to the guidebook. He meandered across a corner of the green, as if he were going towards one of the many walkers’ paths that spidered out of the village. He paused, pretended to consult the map again, ambled nearer to the children.

  The bigger kids were warming up, throwing and kicking the ball to one another. Some of the older ones were practicing headers. Nathan was trying to kick a ball to and fro with a girl from the toddler class. He fell over his own feet. Two years and three months old. His face was scrunched up with concentration. Vulnerable. He could have picked him up with one hand, run back to the Discovery, thrown him in the backseat, and driven out of there before anyone had time to do anything. How long would it take for the police to respond? Forever, that was how long.

  The ball rolled towards him. He picked it up and grinned at Nathan, said, “Is this your ball, son?” Nathan nodded shyly, and he he
ld out the ball like a lure, drawing the boy towards him. As soon as he was within reach, he gave the ball back with one hand and with the other touched the boy’s head, pretending to ruffle his hair. The boy leapt back as if he had been scalded. The girl from the toddler class grabbed the ball and dragged Nathan away by the hand, glaring over her shoulder. Several women — mothers and teachers — turned to look in his direction, but he was studying the map, pretending indifference to anything going on around him.

  One of the mothers approached him, a bright, polite smile stuck on her face, and said, “Can I help you?” when what she really meant was “If you’re planning on harming one of these children, I will beat you to a pulp with my bare hands.”

  “Sorry,” he said, turning on the charm. He surprised even himself sometimes with the charm. “I’m a bit lost.” Women could never believe it when a guy admitted to being lost, they immediately warmed to you. (“Twenty-five million sperm needed to fertilize an egg,” his ex-wife used to say, “because only one will stop to ask directions.”)

  He shrugged helplessly. “I’m looking for the waterfall?”

  “It’s that way,” the woman said, pointing behind him.

  “Ah,” he said, “I think I’ve been reading the map back to front. Well, thanks,” he added and strode off down the lane towards the waterfall before she could say anything else. He’d have to give it a good ten minutes. It would look too suspicious if he went straight back to the Discovery.

  It was pretty at the waterfall. The limestone and the moss. The trees were black and skeletal, and the water, brown and peaty, looked as if it was in spate, but maybe it always looked like that. They called the waterfall a “force” around here, which was a good word for it. An unstoppable force. Water always found a way, it beat everything in the end. Paper, scissors, rock, water. May the force be with you. He checked his expensive watch again. He wished he still smoked. He wouldn’t mind a drink. If you didn’t smoke and you didn’t drink, then standing by a waterfall for ten minutes with nothing to do was something that could really get to you because all you were left with were your thoughts.

  He searched in his pocket for the plastic bag he’d brought with him. Carefully, he dropped the hair into it and closed it with a plastic clip and pushed it into the pocket of his jacket. He had been clutching the thin black filament in his hand ever since he’d plucked it from the boy’s head. Job done.

  Ten minutes up. He walked quickly back to the mud-caked Discovery. If he didn’t hit any problems, he’d be in Northallerton in an hour and back on the train to London. He jettisoned the OS map, left it on a bench, an unlooked-for gift for someone who thought walking was the way to go. Then Jackson Brodie climbed back into his vehicle and started the engine. There was only one place he wanted to be. Home. He was out of here.

  The Life and Adventures of Reggie Chase, Containing a Faithful Account of the Fortunes, Misfortunes, Uprisings, Downfallings, and Complete Career of the Chase Family

  Reggie spooned some kind of vegetable mush into the baby’s mouth. It was just as well the baby was strapped into his high chair, because every so often he would suddenly fling out his arms and legs and try to launch himself into the air like a suicidal starfish. “Uncontrollable joy,” Dr. Hunter had explained to Reggie. Dr. Hunter laughed. “Food makes him very happy.” The baby wasn’t fussy, the vegetable mush (“sweet potato and avocado”) smelled like old socks and looked like dog diarrhea. All the baby’s food was organic, cooked from scratch by Dr. Hunter before being mashed up and frozen in little plastic tubs so that all Reggie had to do was defrost it and warm it through in the microwave. The baby was just a year old, and Dr. Hunter still breast-fed him when she came back from work. “So many long-term benefits for his health,” she said. “It’s what breasts are meant for,” she added when Reggie averted her eyes in embarrassment. The baby was called Gabriel. “My angel,” Dr. Hunter said.

  This was Reggie’s sixth month as Dr. Hunter’s “mother’s help.” They had agreed on this old-fashioned term at what passed for a job interview, as neither of them liked the word nanny. “Like a goat,” Reggie said. “I had a nanny once,” Dr. Hunter said. “She was an absolute horror.”

  Reggie was sixteen and could have passed for twelve. If she forgot her bus pass, she could still get on board for a child’s fare. Nobody asked, nobody checked, nobody really took any notice of Reggie at all. Sometimes she wondered if she was invisible. It was very easy to slip between the cracks, especially if you were small.

  When her bus pass ran out, Billy offered to make her another one. He had already made her an ID card — “So you can get into pubs,” he said, but Reggie never went into pubs. For one thing, she didn’t have anyone to go into a pub with, and for another, no one would have believed the fake ID. Just last week, when she was doing the early Sunday morning shift in Mr. Hussain’s shop, a woman had told her that she was too young to wear makeup. Reggie would have liked to say, “And you’re too old to wear it,” but unlike, apparently, everyone else in the world, she kept her opinions to herself.

  Reggie spent her life going around saying, “I’m sixteen,” to people who didn’t believe her. The stupid thing was that inside she was a hundred years old. And anyway, Reggie didn’t want to go into a pub; she didn’t see the point of alcohol, or drugs. People had little enough control over their lives without losing more. Reggie thought of Mum and the Man-Who-Came-Before-Gary knocking back cheap white wine from Lidl and “getting jiggy,” as the Man-Who-Came-Before-Gary liked to call it. Gary had two big advantages over the Man-Who-Came-Before-Him — one, he wasn’t married, and two, he didn’t leer at Reggie every time he saw her. If Mum hadn’t met Gary, she would at this moment — Reggie checked her watch — be skimming bar codes over scanners and looking forward to her afternoon break (“Tea, Twix, and a fag, lovely”).

  “Do you want a phone?” Billy was always saying to Reggie, taking two or three out of his pocket. “Wadjyerwan — Nokia, Samsung?” There was no point, Billy’s phones never worked for more than a week. It seemed safer, in all ways, for a person to stick with her Virgin Pay as You Go. Reggie liked the way Richard Branson had made Virgin into a huge global brand-name, the way the Catholics had done with Jesus’s mother. It was good to see the word out there. Reggie would be quite happy to die a virgin. The virgin queen, Virgo Regina. A vestal virgin. Ms. MacDonald said that vestal virgins who “lost their sexual innocence” were buried alive. Letting the vestal fires go out was a sign of impurity, which seemed a bit harsh. How neurotic would that make you? Especially in a time before firelighters.

  They had done an unseen translation together of some of Pliny’s letters. “Pliny the Younger,” Ms. MacDonald always emphasized, as if it were of crucial importance that you got your Plinys right, when in fact there was probably hardly anyone left on earth who gave a monkey’s about which was the elder and which was the younger. Who gave a monkey’s about them, period.

  Still, it was good to think that Billy was willing to do things for her, even if they were nearly always illegal things. She had accepted the ID card because one day it might come in handy, but she had never taken up the offer of the bus pass. You never knew, it might be the first step on a slippery slope that would eventually lead to something much bigger. Billy had started with pinching sweets from Mr. Hussain’s shop, and look at him now, pretty much a career criminal.

  Have you had much experience with children, Reggie?” Dr. Hunter had asked at her so-called interview.

  “Och, loads. Really. Loads and loads,” Reggie replied, smiling and nodding encouragingly at Dr. Hunter, who didn’t seem very good at the whole interviewing thing. “Loads, sweartogod.”

  Reggie wouldn’t have employed herself. Sixteen and no experience of children, even though she had great character references from Mr. Hussain and Ms. MacDonald and a letter from Mum’s friend Trish saying how good she was with children, based on the fact that in exchange for her tea she had spent a whole year of Monday evenings with Grant, Trish’s
eldest muppet of a son, trying to coax him through his Maths Standard Grade exam (a hopeless case if ever there was one).

  Reggie had never actually had a close encounter with a one-year-old child before, or indeed any small children, but what was there to know? They were small, they were helpless, they were confused, and Reggie could easily identify with all of that. And it wasn’t that long since she had been a child herself, although she had an “old soul,” a fortune-teller had told her. Body of a child, mind of an old woman. Old before her time. Not that she believed in fortune-tellers. The one who told her about her old soul lived in a new brick house with a view of the Pentlands and was called Sandra. Reggie had encountered her on a hen night for one of Mum’s friends who was about to embark on another disastrous marriage, and Reggie had tagged along as usual, like a mascot. That was what happened when you had no friends of your own — your social life consisted of outings to fortune-tellers, bingo halls, Daniel O’Donnell concerts (“Pass the Revels along to Reggie”). No wonder she had an old soul. Even now that Mum was gone, her friends still phoned her up and said, “We’re going over to Glasgow for a shopping trip, Reggie, want to come with us?” or “Fancy seeing Blood Brothers at the Playhouse?” No and no. Now are our revels ended. Ha.

  There had been nothing unearthly about fortune-telling Sandra. A plump legal secretary in her fifties, she wore a rose-pink cardigan with a shawl collar pinned by a coral cameo brooch. In her bathroom all the toiletries were Crabtree & Evelyn’s Gardenia, lined up a precise inch from the edge of the shelves as if they were still on display in the shop.