When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

  A couple of years ago, not long after she met Patrick and when Archie’s behavior was at its most worrying, she had gone for therapy, something she had always sworn she would never do. Never say never. She did it for Archie, thinking that his problems must be a result of hers, that if she could be a better mother, his life would improve. And she did it for Patrick too because he seemed to represent a chance for change, to become like other people.

  It was cognitive behavioral stuff that didn’t delve too deeply into the murk of her psychopathology, thank God. The basic principle was that she should learn to avoid negative thinking, freeing her to have a more positive attitude to life. The therapist, a hippie-ish, well-intentioned woman called Jenny who looked as if she’d knitted herself, told Louise to visualize a place where she could put all her negative thoughts and Louise had chosen a chest at the bottom of the sea, the kind that was beloved of pirates in storybooks — hooped and banded with metal, padlocked and hasped to keep safe, not treasure, but Louise’s unhelpful thoughts.

  The more detailed the better, Jenny said, and so Louise added coral and shells to the gritty sand, barnacles clinging to the sides of the chest, curious fishes and sharks nosing it, lobsters and crabs crawling all over it, fronds of seaweed waving in the tidal currents. She became an adept with the locks and the keys, could visit her underwater world at the flick of a mental switch. The problem was that when she had safely locked up all the negative thoughts at the bottom of the sea, there was nothing else left, no positive thoughts at all. “Guess I’m just not a positive person,” she said to Jenny. She thought Jenny would protest, pull her to her maternal, knitted bosom and tell her it was just a matter of time (and money) before she was fixed. But Jenny agreed with her and said, “I guess not.”

  She stopped going to Jenny and not long after she accepted Patrick’s proposal.

  Archie went to Fettes now. Two years ago, at the age of fourteen, he had been on the edge of something bad. It had only been some petty thieving, some bunking off school, trouble with the police (oh, the irony), but she could tell, because she’d seen it enough times in other teenagers, that if it weren’t nipped in the bud, it wouldn’t be just a phase, it would be a way of life. He was ready for a change or it wouldn’t have worked. She used her mother’s life insurance to pay his exorbitant school fees (“So the drunken old cow’s good for something at last,” Louise said.).The school was the kind of place that Louise had spent her red-flagged life railing against — privilege, the perpetuation of the ruling hegemony, yada, yada, yada. And now she was subscribing to it because the greater good wasn’t an argument she was going to deploy when it came to her own flesh and blood. “What about your principles?” someone said to her, and she said, “Archie is my principles.”

  The gamble had paid off. Two years later and he had gone from Gothic to geek (his true métier all along) in one relatively easy move and now hung about with his geek confrères in the astronomy club, the chess club, the computer club, and God knew what other activities that seemed entirely alien to Louise. Louise had an MA in literature, and she was sure that if she’d had a daughter, they would have had great chats about the Brontës and George Eliot. (While what? They baked cakes and did each other’s makeup? Get real, Louise.)

  “It’s not too late,” Patrick said.

  “For what?”

  “A baby.”

  A chill went through her. Someone had opened a door into her heart and let in the north wind. Did he want a baby? She couldn’t ask him in case he said yes. Was he going to seduce her into it, like he’d seduced her into marriage? She already had a child, a child who was wrapped around her heart, and she couldn’t walk on that wild shore again.

  All her life she had been fighting. “Time to stop,” Patrick said, massaging her shoulders after a particularly grueling day at work. “Lay down your arms and surrender, take things how they come.”

  “You should have been a Zen master,” she said.

  “I am.”

  She hadn’t expected ever to hit forty and suddenly find herself in a two-car family, to be living in an expensive flat, to be wearing a rock the size of Gibraltar. Most people would see this as a goal or an improvement but Louise felt as if she might have taken the wrong road without even noticing the turning. Sometimes, in her more paranoid moments, she wondered if Patrick had somehow managed to hypnotize her.

  She had changed their insurance policy when they moved, and the woman on the other end of the phone went through all the standard questions — age of the building, how many rooms, is there an alarm system in place — before asking, “Do you keep any jewels, furs, or shotguns on the premises?” and for a moment Louise felt an unexpected thrill at the idea of a life containing those elements. (She’d made a start — she had the jewel.) She had clearly missed her way, parceled everything up nice and neat, settled down, when the real Louise wanted to be out there somewhere, living the outlaw life, wearing jewels and furs, toting a gun. Even the idea of furs didn’t worry her that much. She could shoot something and skin it and eat it. Better than the unfeeling distance between the abattoir and the soft, pale packages at the Waitrose meat counter.

  “No,” she said to the woman at the insurance company, returning to sobriety, “only my engagement ring.” Twenty thousand pounds’ worth of secondhand bling. Sell it and run, Louise. Run fast. Joanna Hunter had been a runner (was she still?), a university athletics champion. She had run once and it had saved her life, perhaps she had made sure that no one was ever going to catch her. Louise had read the notice board hanging in the Hunters’ kitchen, the little everyday trophies and mementoes of a life — postcards, certificates, photographs, messages. Nothing, of course, about the event that must have shaped her entire existence; murder wasn’t something you tended to pin up on your kitchen corkboard. Alison Needler, on the other hand, didn’t run. She hid.

  Louise hardly saw Archie now. He had elected to board during the week because he would rather live in a school than with his mother. On weekends he sought out the same boys he spent all week at school with.

  “Stop fretting,” Patrick said. “He’s sixteen, he’s spreading his wings.”

  Louise thought of Icarus.

  “And learning to fly.”

  Louise thought of the dead bird she had found outside the flat on the weekend. A bad omen. Little cock sparrow shot by a boy with a bow and arrow.

  “He has to grow up.”

  “I don’t see why.”

  “Louise,” Patrick said gently, “Archie’s happy.”

  “Happy?” Happy wasn’t a word she had employed in the context of Archie since he was a little boy. How wonderfully, joyously untrammeled he had been then in his happiness. She thought it was fixed forever, didn’t realize that childhood happiness dissolves away, because she herself had never known happiness as a child. If she had realized that Archie wasn’t going to be that sunny innocent forever, she would have laid up every moment as treasure. Then she could have it again if she wanted. The north wind howled. She shut the door.

  She was on her way back from a meeting with the Amethyst team out at the Gyle. That was how Louise first came across Alison Needler, six months before the murders, when she was seconded for a few months to Amethyst, the Family Protection Unit. David Needler, defying the court injunction against him, had taken up a position on the family lawn in Trinity, where he was threatening to set himself alight with his kids and ex-wife watching from an upstairs window. When Louise arrived, hot on the heels of the Instant Response Vehicle, he was being berated by Alison’s sister Debbie, standing on the front doorstep. (“Lippy, our Debs,” according to Alison. Well, she paid the price for that, didn’t she?) Taunted, perhaps, rather than berated (“Go on then, you bastard, let’s see you torch yourself.”).

  In court the next day, David Needler had been cautioned and told to obey the injunction and stay away from his family, which he did, until he came back six months later with a shotgun.

  Louise pulled into the car park
at Howdenhall. Check in at the station, pick up her own car, back on the road in five minutes. She had plenty of time.

  Final report’s back from Forensics, boss,” her baby DC, Marcus McLellen, said to her, handing her a folder. “As was anticipated, the amusement-arcade fire was definitely willful fire-raising.”

  Twenty-six years old, Marcus had a BA in media studies from Stirling (who didn’t?) and a head of hair that would have given Shirley Temple a run for her money if he had allowed it to grow instead of sensibly shearing it into astrakhan. He was a rugby player, and Louise had once shivered in freezing-cold stands on a Saturday morning, shouting herself hoarse in support of him (a great outlet for aggression, she discovered), which was something she had never been able to do for weedy, sports-phobic Archie.

  Marcus’s baptism of fire after coming from uniform had been the Needler case, and he’d handled it even better than she’d expected. He was a sweet boy, downright cherubic, straight as a Roman road, tougher than he looked, and always cheerful. Like Patrick. Where did it come from, this cheerfulness? Did they imbibe it with their mother’s milk? (Poor Archie, then.)

  She had taken Marcus under her wing, a mother hen. Louise had never felt maternal towards anyone she had worked with before, and it was an unsettling experience. It must be age, she concluded. But Marcus? — a strangely Latinate name for someone born in Sighthill. (“Aspirational mother, boss,” he said. “Better than Titus. Or Sextus.”) He had been razor-keen on the Needler case, but she had taken him off it and put him on something else. “So you can get more experience,” she told him but really she just didn’t want him to end up as obsessed with Alison Needler as she was. So now he was working on an amusement arcade in Bread Street that had mysteriously gone up in flames a couple of weeks ago.

  “Insurance?” Louise speculated. “Or malicious? Or just neds messing about with matches?”

  Willful fire-raising, a baroque Scottish term for arson, the chief suspect for which, in Louise’s book, was always going to be the owner of the property. Insurance money was just too tempting a prospect when you were needing money. Twenty thousand for a diamond, how much for an amusement arcade? An amusement arcade owned by none other than the lovely Dr. Joanna Hunter’s husband, Neil. (“And what does Mr. Hunter do?” she had said conversationally to Joanna Hunter when she visited her yesterday. “Oh, this and that,” Joanna Hunter said lightly. “Neil’s always looking for the next big opportunity, he’s a natural-born entrepreneur.”) Just what the lovely Dr. Hunter was doing being married to someone with business interests in the pubic triangle (as it was known) of Bread Street, with its strip joints, dodgy pubs, and show bars, was anyone’s guess. Shouldn’t she be married to somebody more respectable — an orthopedic surgeon, for example?

  According to his wife, Neil Hunter was in “the leisure industry,” a term that seemed to cover a lot of possibilities. In his case it seemed to be two or three amusement arcades, a couple of health clubs (not particularly upmarket), and a small fleet of private-hire vehicles (tired-looking four-door sedans masquerading as “executive cars”) and a couple of beauticians, one in Leith, one in Sighthill, that looked like health hazards — Louise was pretty sure that Joanna Hunter had never had a facial in one of them, the Sheraton One Spa they weren’t.

  “Fill me in on our Mr. Hunter.”

  “Well, when he first came to Edinburgh,” Marcus said, “he started with a burger van parked in Bristo Square. That way he caught the students as well as the pubs coming out.”

  “Burger van. Classy.”

  “Which burned to the ground in the wee small hours when it was unattended.”

  “Well, there’s a coincidence.”

  “Moved on to a wine bar, a café, a food-delivery service, anything he could try his hand at, really.”

  “Any of them catch fire?”

  “The café, actually. An electrical fault.”

  “And the arcade?”

  “A lot of petrol splashed around inside,” Marcus said. “Not a spur-of-the-moment thing. Door was broken into at the back, all the alarms were on, but by the time the fire brigade arrived at the scene, the place was well alight.”

  “And the word on the pavement on Mr. Hunter these days?”

  “Word is he’s clean,” Marcus said. “Bit of a rogue, but to all intents and purposes, a legitimate businessman.”

  “So it’s just the people he associates with who are dodgy?”

  She had already seen the photos that the Fraud squad had sent over, nice crisp images of Hunter sharing a variety of beverages over the weeks with one Michael Anderson from Glasgow, plus various hangers-on. “His retinue,” Marcus said. “Look at these guys, faces only a mother could love.” Anderson was suspected of drug dealing in his hometown but was so far up the food chain in his luxury penthouse that Strathclyde Police had found it hard to hang anything on him. “Good lawyers,” Marcus said.

  “Or bad lawyers, depending on how you look at it.”

  The Fraud officers thought that Anderson had run out of ways to clean his money in Glasgow and was looking to Edinburgh, to utilize a bit of Neil Hunter’s “this and that,” as his lovely wife would have it. Dr. Hunter wore the word wife so much better than Louise did.

  “How did you two meet?” Louise had asked her yesterday, pretending to be the kind of woman who was interested in romantic anecdotes, who listened to Steve Wright’s Sunday Love Songs while making breakfast in bed for her husband, and not some hard-nosed cow who was probably about to send a report about your husband to the procurator fiscal, who would then probably order his arrest. Joanna Hunter laughed and said, “I treated him in Accident and Emergency, he asked me out to dinner.”

  “And you went?” Louise couldn’t quite keep the incredulity out of her voice.

  “No, highly unethical.” Joanna Hunter laughed again as if the memory were part of some long-treasured amusing story (How I met your father). “He persisted,” she said, “and eventually I gave in.”

  Me too, Louise thought but instead said, “My mother and father met on holiday,” and Joanna Hunter said, “Ah, a holiday romance!” and Louise didn’t say, Actually, he picked her up in a bar on Gran Canaria and she never could remember his name, which hardly mattered as he wasn’t the only contender for the coveted role of totally absent father to Louise.

  “Why was Mr. Hunter in A and E?” Louise asked.

  “He’d been set upon by some thugs.”

  Accident-prone, keeping bad company, all the signs there at the beginning. Why on earth would the lovely doctor go out with someone like that?

  “I liked his energy,” she offered, unprompted. Dogs are energetic, Louise thought and smiled and said, “Yes, that’s what my mother said about my father.”

  She didn’t mention the arcade fire to Joanna Hunter, it seemed impolite given the nature of the news she had brought to her doorstep.

  “Call me Jo,” she said.

  There’s nothing concrete to link Hunter to any of the Glaswegian guys,” Louise said to Marcus. “Maybe Anderson and Hunter were wee pals at primary school.”

  “Well, word on the pavey also says Hunter’s on the edge of going under,” Marcus said. “Has been for a while. Going into business with Anderson might be one way of keeping afloat, but then so might the insurance payout from a big fire.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” Louise said, picking up the file.

  “Boss?”

  “What? Not my job, me being such a high big wig? He lives round the corner from me. I’ll pop in on my way to work tomorrow morning.” She didn’t say, “I’m reading my way through his father-in-law’s canon.” Certainly didn’t say, “I’m fascinated by Joanna Hunter, she’s the other side of me, the woman I never became — the good survivor, the good wife, the good mother.” “Let’s apply to the procurator fiscal for a warrant to get our hands on Hunter’s documentation.”

  “Yes, boss.” He looked disappointed at having the case snatched literally from under his nose.

&
nbsp; “I’ll just talk to him,” Louise soothed, “and then you can have him back. I have a bit of a connection, I had to go and see his wife yesterday, that’s all.”

  “His wife?”

  “Joanna.”

  DS Karen Warner came through the open door to Louise’s office and dropped a pile of files on her desk. “Yours, I think,” she said, resting her weight against the desk. A walking filing cabinet, eight months pregnant with her first baby and still at work. (“Going down fighting, boss.”) She was older than Louise (“Elderly primigravidas — how disgusting does that sound?”). Motherhood was going to be a shock to her, Louise thought. She was going to hit the wall at sixty miles an hour and wonder what happened.

  Karen was still on the Needler team, halved in size now from what it had been six urgent months ago, moved back now from St. Leonard’s to Howdenhall and occupying a smaller incident room. Louise’s superintendent had suggested it was time for her to “move on a little” from the Needler case, to start taking on other cases. “You’re obsessed with Alison Needler,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she agreed cheerfully. “I am. It’s my job to be obsessed.”

  Karen unwrapped a Snickers bar and bit into it, patting her stomach. “License to eat,” she said to Louise. “Want a bit?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Louise was starving, but there wasn’t anything she fancied. Marriage seemed to have affected her normally good appetite. Patrick seemed to grow healthier on it, while she was fading away. She had flirted briefly with bulimia in her teens, between the self- cutting and an early bout of binge drinking (Bacardi and Coke, the thought of it now made her want to throw up), but all those things felt like an addiction of one kind or another, so she had stopped. Only room for one addict in the family, and her mother had had no intention of giving up her place.

  Karen looked at the report on Louise’s desk. “Same Hunter?” she said. “Neil Hunter is Joanna Hunter’s husband? Wow. There’s a coincidence.”