When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

  Those were the ones who turned up uninvited at their daughter’s Unicorn Magic–themed birthday party and shot their mother-in-law in the head while she was dishing up Jell-O and ice cream in the kitchen and then hunted down their sister-in-law like a deer and shot her in the head too — in front of ten screaming seven-year-old girls, one of whom was their own daughter. Three Needler children altogether, Simone, Charlotte, and Cameron. Ten, seven, and five. The birthday girl, Charlotte, pistol-whipped by their father when she tried to come between him and her aunt Debbie. (“Always a brave wee girl, our Charlie,” Alison said.) Debbie must have understood the moment the first shot rang out in the kitchen, because she had herded the children into the conservatory at the back of the house, and when David Needler raised his gun at her, she was trying to shield them with her body, all ten of them. Right up to the last she was yelling at him, telling him what a bastard he was. Give a medal to Aunt Debbie.

  Alison herself had been upstairs with Cameron, who was throwing up in the toilet after too much sugar and excitement, when her ex rampaged through the houseful of women and girls. Alison’s mother was dead on the kitchen floor, her sister, Debbie, lay dying in the conservatory, her bloody head being mopped by her own ten-year-old daughter with handfuls of Unicorn Magic napkins. David Needler tried to carry off Simone, and a neighbor, one of the party mothers, fought him off. On a day when she thought the most testing thing she was going to have to do was survive two hours of hysterical seven-year-olds, she ended up battling for her life after David Needler shot her point-blank in the chest. She lost the fight. Three lives, three deaths, the same tally as Andrew Decker.

  David Needler ran, no child as a trophy. At the first shot, Alison Needler had snatched up Cameron and hid with him in the wardrobe in her bedroom.

  Andrew Decker didn’t destroy his own family, he destroyed someone else’s. He destroyed Howard Mason’s. Men like Decker were inadequates, they were loners, maybe they just couldn’t stand to see people enjoying the lives they never had. A mother and her children, wasn’t that the bond at the heart of everything?

  Hide or run? Louise hoped she would stand and fight. If you were on your own, you could fight, if you were on your own, you could run. You couldn’t do either when you were with children. You could try. Gabrielle Mason had tried, her hands and arms were covered in defensive wounds where she had tried to stave off Andrew Decker’s knife. She had fought to the death protecting her young. Give a medal to Gabrielle Mason.

  Louise had been there, been there with Archie when he was little, at the empty play parks and deserted duck ponds, suddenly aware of the nutter’s sloping walk, his shifting gaze. Don’t make eye contact. Walk past briskly, don’t draw attention to yourself. Somewhere, in some Utopian nowhere, women walked without fear. Louise would sure like to see that place.

  Give medals to all the women.

  There had been flowers in a blue-and-white jug on a side table in the Hunters’ living room. No, not flowers, not cheap, thoughtless, hothouse flowers grown in Kenya, but leggy, twiggy things from the Hunters’ own garden — “winter honeysuckle and Christmas box,” Joanna Hunter had said. “They both have a lovely scent. It’s so nice to have flowers in winter.” Louise feigned interest. She suspected that she was genetically incapable of growing things, that nurturing wasn’t in her mitochondrial DNA. Samantha and Patrick had “shared the gardening” in their old house. Now Louise and Patrick’s small, new garden was all turfed lawn, trimmed with a few tedious perennials and shrubs. Louise wasn’t really sure what a shrub was, the only time she had actually been in their garden was when they had a last-chance housewarming barbecue in Indian summer for the great and good of the neighborhood, including two senior policemen, a sheriff, and a crime writer. That was Edinburgh for you.

  The first Mrs. de Winter, Samantha, had been the green-thumbed type. “Sweet peas, tomatoes, hanging baskets, she loved the garden,” Patrick said. She could identify a shrub at a hundred paces, presumably. The Good Wife.

  “Lovely,” Louise said to Joanna Hunter, breathing in the scent of the winter honeysuckle. She wasn’t lying, it was lovely. Joanna Hunter was lovely, her house was lovely, her baby was lovely. Everything about her life was just lovely. Apart from the whole family-massacred-in-childhood thing.

  “You can’t get over something like that,” Louise had said to Patrick in bed last night.

  “No, but you can try,” he said.

  “Who made you the voice of wisdom?” Louise said, but only in her head, because the love of a good man wasn’t something to be thrown away like a piece of paper. Even Louise wasn’t so blunt-headed that she couldn’t see that.

  Joanna Hunter had gone upstairs and come back with a photograph, black-and-white in a plain frame. She passed it silently to Louise. A woman and three children — Gabrielle, Jessica, Joanna, Joseph. It was an arty kind of photograph (“My father took it”), a close-up, their faces crowded together, Jessica smiling self- consciously, Joanna grinning happily, the baby just a baby. Gabrielle was beautiful, no arguing with that. She wasn’t smiling.

  “I don’t keep it out,” Joanna Hunter said. “I couldn’t bear to look at them every day. I take it out now and then. Put it away again.”

  Howard Mason had married several times after his wife was murdered. How had the subsequent wives felt about their dead predecessor? The first wife. Gabrielle, beautiful, talented, a mother of three, and murdered into the bargain — that was an impossible act to follow. The second wife, Martina, killed herself; the third — the Chinese one (as everyone referred to her) — was divorced by Howard Mason; the fourth had some kind of horrible accident, fell downstairs or set herself on fire, Louise couldn’t remember. There was a fifth one somewhere—Latin America, who outlived him. Louise wouldn’t be surprised if there was a beheading in there somewhere. You would certainly have thought twice before saying “I do” to Howard Mason. “My Last Duchess”— the Browning poem—came unexpectedly into her mind. The thought brought a chill with it.

  As time had gone by, Howard Mason had become more famous for his dead wives than for any literary talent that he possessed. Louise had never read any of his novels, he was before her time. After her meeting yesterday with Joanna Hunter, she had looked his books up on Amazon, but he seemed to be out of print. You might have thought that after the murders, a certain notoriety would have boosted his sales, but instead he became a kind of pariah. He might be dead and out of fashion as well as print, but he continued to live on, on the Internet, the ghost in the machine.

  As chance would have it, on her way home Louise had stopped off at the Oxfam Bookshop on Morningside Road and found a secondhand copy of Howard Mason’s first, most famous novel, The Shopkeeper, and had read most of it in bed last night.

  “Could he write?” Patrick asked. He was reading some kind of abstruse medical journal. (Should she take more interest in his profession? He was always interested in hers.)

  “Yeah, he can write, but it’s of its time. It must have felt very cutting-edge way back when, but it’s all very, I don’t know, northern.”

  “‘Eeh ba gum’?”

  “More like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.”

  Howard Mason was a northern grammar-school boy with an Oxford scholarship who wrote as if he’d read too much D. H. Lawrence as a teenager. The Shopkeeper, written after he graduated, was an “acid critique” (according to the Dictionary of Literary Biography) of his dull parents and his provincial background, an autobiographical source that he always freely admitted to. To Louise, it read like a rather spiteful revenge text. There was a thin line between fact and fiction in Howard Mason’s life.

  The Shopkeeper was written when Howard Mason was still green, before his life became Grand Guignol, before he fathered three children, before he married Gabrielle Ascher, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, the last three attributes lost the minute she signed the marriage register in Gretna Green at the age of seventeen. Was Howard Mas
on such a terrible choice that the parents felt they had to disinherit her? What happened after she died, did Joanna Mason become a rich little orphan? Questions, questions. Joanna Hunter had got under Louise’s skin. She had stood on the edge of the unknowable, she had been to a place that no one would choose to go to, and she had come back. It gave her a mysterious power that Louise envied.

  Andrew Decker had, surprise, surprise, been a model prisoner. Helped to run the library, worked in the Braille shop, converting books to Braille, refurbished wheelchairs, all very worthy. Sometimes Louise hankered after the days when prisoners were made to walk endlessly on treadmills or turn crank handles. Pedophiles, murderers, rapists, should they really be making books? If it were up to Louise, she would put the lot of them down, though obviously this was not the kind of opinion she voiced at divisional meetings. (“Have you always been a fascist?” Patrick laughed. “Pretty much,” she replied.)

  Andrew Decker had done his A levels, got an Open University degree in philosophy (of course), showed no sign of wishing harm to anyone. Right. And thirty years ago he’d slaughtered a family when, according to his workmates, he’d been “an ordinary guy.” Yeah, Louise thought, you had to watch out for the ordinary ones. David Needler was ordinary. Decker was only fifty, he might have another good twenty years left in him of being ordinary. Still, look on the bright side — he had a degree in philosophy.

  “At least he served the full sentence,” Joanna Hunter said. “That’s something, I suppose.” But it wasn’t really, and they both knew it.

  “I might go away,” Joanna Hunter said. “Escape, for a bit, just until the fuss dies down.”

  “Good idea.”

  In Livingston, Alison Needler was under siege, staying inside her house all day, growing pale, venturing out only to walk the children to school. She wouldn’t drive them because she was convinced that David Needler would rig a device to the car and blow them all up. David Needler had been a quantity surveyor and had no apparent knowledge of explosives, but Louise supposed that once paranoia had got lodged in your brain, it was pretty hard to shift. On the other hand, of course, who would have expected David Needler to have a gun, or to know how to shoot it?

  Louise didn’t know what Alison did all day, all her shopping was done on the Internet and she said she was “too wound up” to pound the carpet to an exercise video or sit peacefully and quilt a patchwork (two amongst several suggestions from a social worker). Whenever Louise went inside the house, it was immaculate, so she guessed Alison did a lot of cleaning. The TV was usually on and there was no sign of any books; she said she used to enjoy reading but now she couldn’t concentrate. Louise remembered the Needlers’ house in Trinity, it had been a good one, semi-detached sandstone, big garden back and front, the front one just right for a man to immolate himself in.

  Alison Needler had two locks on every window, three each on the back and front doors, plus dead bolts. She had a security system with bells and whistles, she had a panic button, a mobile dedicated to an emergency number, and her kids had personal alarms hanging round their necks when they weren’t locked in school.

  She’d been moved to a safe house but Alison would never be safe. If Louise were Alison Needler, she would get a big dog. A really, really big dog. If she were Alison Needler, she would change her name, dye her hair, move far away, to the Highlands, to England, France, the North Pole. She wouldn’t be in a safe house in Livingston, waiting for the big bad wolf to come and blow it all away.

  Louise thought that perhaps she should station a car outside the house for the duration of the festive season. If David Needler was ever going to come back, then Christmas seemed a likely time, season of goodwill and all that. Louise hoped he would, she would have liked to get an Incident Response Vehicle over here, rouse the Gold Commander from his Christmas merrymaking to give the order to shoot the bastard dead.

  Louise’s phone rang. Patrick. He would be wondering where she was. She wondered herself. Louise checked her watch. Christ, six o’clock. So much for twice-baked soufflés, it was going to have to be an omelette for the in-laws.

  “Louise?”

  “Yes.” To her own ears she sounded efficient, maybe just this side of snappy. What she should be saying is “I’m incredibly sorry, I’m letting you down,” et cetera, but the give-and-take, the push and pull, the compromise and negotiation of a partnership just didn’t seem to be in her. It felt like she’d been doing it all her life with Archie, she couldn’t start again with a grown man. Patrick genuinely didn’t seem to mind, but you could bet your bottom dollar that he would one day.

  She should have got the flowers. They would have made it look as if she cared. She did care. Possibly not quite enough.

  “I’m on my way home,” she said. “Sorry.”

  “Aren’t you off duty now?” he said mildly.

  “Something came up.”

  “Where are you? You’re in Livingston, aren’t you? You’re sitting in your car outside that woman’s house, aren’t you? You’re obsessed, sweetheart.”

  “No, I’m not.” She was, but hey. “And her name’s Alison, not ‘that woman.’ ”

  “Sorry. He’s long gone, you know. Needler’s not coming back.”

  “Yes he is. Want to take a bet?”

  “I’m not a betting man.”

  “You’re Irish, of course you are. Anyway, I’ll be home soon. Sorry,” she added again for good measure. They seemed to spend a lot of time apologizing to each other. Maybe that was a good thing, showed they had manners.

  Alison Needler’s curtain opened a few inches and her face appeared, pale and disembodied, cigarette smoke curling around her head like an aura. She didn’t used to smoke around the kids, once she never smoked at all, once she’d had a normal kind of life, part time admin assistant at Napier, three kids, husband, nice house in Trinity, not this tired gray pebble-dash with rubbish in the neighboring garden. Not really normal at all, of course, it just looked normal. Ordinary. The curtain closed and Alison disappeared.

  Louise cared, about Alison Needler, about Joanna Hunter. Jackson Brodie had cared about missing girls, he wanted them all found. Louise didn’t want them to get lost in the first place. There were a lot of ways of getting lost, not all of them involved being missing. Not all of them involved hiding. Sometimes women got lost right there in plain sight. Alison Needler, making accommodations, disappearing inside her own marriage, a little more every day. Jackson’s sister stepping off a bus and stepping out of her life one evening in the rain. Gabrielle Mason gone forever on a sunny afternoon.

  At the thought of Jackson Brodie, her heart gave a guilty little twitch. Bad Wife.

  There was no longer a regular police presence at the Needler house. Only Louise driving out there, keeping her vigils at random times of day and night until the section of the M8 between Edinburgh and Livingston was a groove in her brain. There was something meditative about watching over Alison. One day David Needler was going to come back. And when he did, Louise was going to get him.

  She started the engine and Alison Needler reappeared at the window. Louise raised her hand, but Alison didn’t acknowledge the farewell.

  Patrick had ordered a “banquet for four” from a local Chinese restaurant. They’d eaten from there a few times and Louise had thought the food was okay, but beneath the long, rather bulbous nose of Patrick’s elder sister, Bridget, the contents of the sticky foil containers looked less enticing.

  Louise had been so starving on the drive home that she had almost given in to her Scottish genes and stopped to pick up a fish supper, but as soon as she crossed the threshold of their house (“their house,” not “her home”), she had somehow lost her appetite.

  “Sorry. I was hindered,” she said to her new in-laws when she came in the door.

  All Louise wanted to do was strip and stand under a hot shower, but they were already seated at the table, waiting for her. She felt like a recalcitrant teenager dragging herself in late. She imagined this was how
it was for Archie. She felt a tug deep inside somewhere. She wanted her son here, she wanted to put her arms round him and hold him. Not as he was now, but as he was in the past. Her little boy.

  Patrick poured a glass of red wine and passed it to her. The king sits in Dunfermline toun, drinking the blude-red wine. Red wine didn’t go with Chinese food, would she look boorish if she went to the kitchen and got a beer from the fridge? (Yes was obviously the answer to that.) Patrick filled his own glass and clinked it against hers. “Welcome home,” he said, smiling at her.

  She could see the bottom of her wineglass already.

  Bridget picked at a dish of sweet-and-sour chicken with her chopsticks and took a tentative bite. The food looked even less tempting now that Patrick had decanted it into the Wedgwood china dishes that were part of his wedding service. His first wedding service, from his marriage to Samantha. The first Mrs. de Winter, his Last Duchess.

  Bridget must have eaten off the Wedgwood dozens of times before. Nice home-cooked food slaved over by Samantha because she cared about making Patrick happy. (“It wasn’t like that at all,” Patrick said. “Sam was an anesthetist. She worked almost as much as I did.”)

  What was she doing? She was living with a dead woman’s things. Not in a dead woman’s house, she wasn’t that crazy. Patrick was still living in “the family home” when they met, a really lovely house in Dick Place, the kind of house that Louise used to fantasize about living in when she was growing up in a top-floor two-room tenement in Fountainbridge with her mother. Nonetheless, Patrick didn’t hesitate to sell the Dick Place house — for an unbelievable sum of money — and they bought a swanky new duplex flat near the Astley Ainsley Hospital. It had looked vile on the outside — wood trim and metal balconies — but on the inside it had a kind of bland corporate luxury that Louise found strangely appealing. It started out as sterile as an operating theater, but they soon filled it with all the stuff from Patrick’s old house and it lost its neutrality. The first Mrs. de Winter lingered on in her belongings. Patrick had offered to change everything, “right down to the last teaspoon,” and Louise had said, “Don’t be silly,” even though that was exactly what she had wanted him to do but without her having to ask for it. Marry at leisure, repent in haste.