When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

  The thing was. When she brought the dog back from her run in the field, Reggie had gone upstairs to Dr. Hunter’s bedroom — Mr. Hunter’s too, of course — not for any reason, just to be there, to look, to feel closer to Dr. Hunter. She shouldn’t have, she knew, but she wasn’t doing any harm. Dr. Hunter wouldn’t have minded, although you could be pretty sure that Mr. Hunter would.

  The bed hadn’t been made — Mr. Hunter’s “bachelor’s rules.” Otherwise it was pretty tidy, although not as tidy as when Dr. Hunter was home. Sadie circled the room, sniffing everything like a tracker dog — the sheets, the carpet, the dry-cleaning bag that Dr. Hunter brought home with her yesterday lying over the back of a chair. Reggie took the newly cleaned suit out of its plastic shroud and hung it up in the closet next to one of Dr. Hunter’s other suits. The closet was a big, walk-in affair, Dr. Hunter had one side, Mr. Hunter the other. All the clothes on Dr. Hunter’s side smelled faintly of the perfume that she always wore. The plain blue bottle stood on the chest of drawers next to Dr. Hunter’s old- fashioned silver-backed hairbrush, her spare inhaler, and a photograph of the baby taken when he was just a few days old and looking as if he were still waiting to be inflated. Reggie dabbed some of the perfume on the insides of her wrists. Je Reviens. A promise. Or a threat. Hasta la vista, baby. Back soon.

  Where was the third suit? The one already in the wardrobe still had the dry cleaner’s little pink tag attached to its collar with a small safety pin, so the suit that was missing must be the one that Dr. Hunter was wearing yesterday. There was no sign of it anywhere. Had she driven all the way down to Yorkshire to see the mysterious sick aunt without getting changed? That seemed completely out of character for Dr. Hunter, who always got changed the minute she got home from work, kicking off her shoes, hanging up her suit, and throwing on something casual, jeans usually. “There, I’m me again,” she sometimes said, as if the suit were a disguise.

  On the carpet, in front of the chest of drawers, were Dr. Hunter’s low-heeled black pumps, one upright, one fallen over, looking as if Dr. Hunter had just stepped out of them. Sadie sniffed anxiously at each of the shoes as though she were about to be sent off to follow a scent trail. Next to the shoes were Dr. Hunter’s discarded tights in a wrinkled heap on the floor, pale and empty, like an abandoned snake skin.

  Looking at the contents of the closet gave Reggie a funny feeling, a bit like when she looked at Mum’s clothes hanging in the wardrobe or Ms. MacDonald’s clothes in the Dumpster. It seemed to have the same effect on Sadie, who lay down on the floor next to the shoes and gave a mournful whine. Reggie wanted to hear Dr. Hunter’s voice, hear her say, “I’ll be back soon, Reggie, don’t worry.” Reggie was sure that Dr. Hunter wouldn’t feel “bothered” if she phoned her. She dialed Dr. Hunter’s mobile number again but just as the number began to ring, she heard the sound of a car approaching. Sadie pricked up her ears and stood to attention. A glance out the window confirmed it was the Range Rover. “Sugar,” Reggie said to the dog.

  For a mad moment she thought about diving into the bedroom closet, but when people did that in horror films, it never turned out well. They were either found and murdered or they witnessed something horrible from behind the slatted doors of their hiding place.

  The thing was, when she dialed Dr. Hunter’s phone (“my lifeline”) she had heard the unmistakable sound of its ringtone — Bach’s “Crab Canon” (“so called,” Dr. Hunter explained, “because the second voice plays exactly the same notes as the first, only backwards,” which Reggie didn’t entirely understand, but she smiled and nodded and said, “Right, I get it.”). The phone was ringing from somewhere downstairs. Reggie was halfway down the staircase on a hunt for the phone — the Bach sounded as if it were coming from the kitchen — when Mr. Hunter burst through the front door at his usual velocity and was brought up short at the sight of her.

  “Still here, Reggie?”

  “Just been to the loo,” Reggie said, feigning nonchalance. The phone had stopped ringing a beat after Mr. Hunter entered the house.

  “Don’t you have a home to go to?” Mr. Hunter said.

  “Yep, sure do,” she said, marching past him and out the front door. Sadie raced past her, hoovering up familiar smells in the border at the side of the drive. When Reggie reached the gate, she whistled to Sadie, who came trotting up, tail whirling round, the way it did when she was excited at retrieving treasure. She was carrying something in her mouth, and when she reached Reggie, she placed her find at her feet and sat obediently, waiting to be praised.

  Reggie’s heart nearly stopped when she saw what Sadie had dropped on the ground.

  The baby’s comforter, his square of moss-green blanket. It looked as if it had been trampled in the mud, and when Reggie picked it up and examined it, she could see a stain on it, a stain that wasn’t tomato sauce or red wine, a stain that was blood. Reggie knew blood now. She had seen more in the last twenty-four hours than she had seen in a previous lifetime.

  Dr. Hunter’s surgery was in Liberton, and Reggie started walking because she wasn’t sure how Sadie, who had never been on a bus, would fare with all those trampling feet and shoving bodies. Reggie never fared well herself. She ate her Mars bar and would have given a heel of it to Sadie but Dr. Hunter said chocolate was bad for dogs. She would have to buy dog treats, nothing with sugar, Dr. Hunter didn’t like Sadie to have sugar (“Got to look after the old girl’s teeth.”). Reggie had bought a couple of tins of dog food from the Avenue Stores on Blackford Avenue, and they were weighing her bag down. She had to keep swapping it with the Topshop bag on her other shoulder. She felt extremely burdened. Mum used to carry loads of heavy bags around with her — they’d never been able to afford a car — she used to say her genes had been spliced with those of a donkey. No, she didn’t say that, Mum wouldn’t have used the word spliced, she might not even have used genes. What had she said? She was fading, retreating into a darkness where Reggie couldn’t follow. “Bred from a donkey”— that was it. Wasn’t it? The darkness deepens.

  Eventually Reggie felt too tired to walk any farther and caught a bus the rest of the way. Sadie did pretty well for a first-time bus user.

  The surgery was a big, modern, single-story building with no obvious place to leave a dog, so Reggie said “Sit” and “Stay” to Sadie in her most authoritative voice, the one she used on the baby (“No!”) when he was making an accelerated move on a deathly grape or coin. When Sadie was a puppy, Dr. Hunter had taken her to obedience classes, from which Sadie had graduated top of her class. (“Dog school,” Dr. Hunter called it. Which was a lovely idea.) She even had a red rosette, tattered now with age, to prove it, which Dr. Hunter kept pinned to the cork notice board in the kitchen. She was pretty smart for a dog, she could do all the usual sit-and-stay stuff as well as walk tightly to heel like a dog at Crufts. “My Best in Show,” Dr. Hunter said fondly. Sadie had what Dr. Hunter called her “party pieces” as well, she could roll over, and play dead, and shake your hand — her big paw softer and heavier in your hand than you expected.

  Sadie hunkered down obligingly on the ground outside the big glass doors to the surgery, and Reggie went inside and found the reception desk, where a woman was having a silent stand-off with her computer. Without even glancing in Reggie’s direction, she put her hand up and made a kind of halt sign to her. Reggie wondered if she was going to say “Sit” and “Stay.” Eventually the receptionist tore her eyes away from the screen and, giving Reggie a starchy look, said, “Yes?” It pained Reggie to think that Dr. Hunter worked in a place that contained such unfriendly people.

  “I know Dr. Hunter’s away,” Reggie said. “I just wondered when she would be back?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.”

  “Because it’s confidential information?”

  “Because I don’t know. Are you looking for an appointment with her?”

  “No.”

  “Because I can make one with another doctor.”

  “No, no, t
hank you. You don’t know why she’s gone away, do you?” Reggie asked hopefully.

  “No, I can’t tell you that.”

  “Because it’s confidential information?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just one last thing,” Reggie said. “Did she phone in herself, or was it Mr. Hunter?”

  “Who are you?”

  Little Miss Nobody. Sister of the lesser Billy. Orphan of the storm. Little Polly Flinders sitting amongst the cinders. Reggie didn’t say any of that, of course, she just said, “Well, see ya,” and hoped she wouldn’t.

  On the way out of the surgery, passing a seemingly endless display of posters urging her to brush her teeth twice a day and eat five pieces of fruit and watch out for chlamydia, Reggie bumped into one of the midwives attached to the practice. Dr. Hunter’s friend Sheila.

  One afternoon in late summer Dr. Hunter came home with her and said, “Sheila, this is the famous Reggie, she’s my life-support system,” then Sheila and Dr. Hunter sat in the garden with the baby crawling around on the grass (“I can’t believe how he’s grown, Jo!”) and drank Pimm’s, even though Dr. Hunter said, “God, Sheila, I’m breastfeeding, this is shameful,” but they were laughing about it and Sheila said, “It’s fine, Jo. Trust me, I’m a midwife,” and they laughed even more.

  They invited Reggie to join them but Reggie thought someone should keep a sober eye on things in case they became drunk in charge of a baby, but, of course, Dr. Hunter wasn’t like that, and she made one drink last until the afternoon had begun to lengthen into twilight, when Mr. Hunter arrived home and said, “Still here, Reggie?”

  Both women had looked disconcerted at the sight of Mr. Hunter, striding across the lawn with a can of beer in his hand like someone who’d crash-landed from another world, but then he said, “Can anyone join this session, then?” and Dr. Hunter said, “You’ve come late to the party, we’re as tight as ticks here,” which wasn’t true, and Mr. Hunter said, “Aye, a right pair of jakies,” and they all three laughed and Reggie went out and scooped the baby up from the lawn and put him to bed with a bottle — Dr. Hunter kept a stash of expressed milk in the freezer. Reggie had once seen Mr. Hunter take out the bottle of Stoli he kept in the freezer and frown at the sight of the little containers of frozen breast milk. “The difference between men and women,” he laughed when he saw Reggie watching. “By the contents of their freezer shall you know them.”

  It’s Reggie, isn’t it?” Sheila said. She pointed at her chest and said, “I’m Sheila, Jo’s friend. Sheila Hayes.”

  “Yes, I know, I remember. Hi.”

  “How are you? Are you looking for Jo? I don’t think she’s in today, I haven’t seen her, anyway.”

  “She’s gone away to see a sick aunt in Yorkshire.”

  “Really? She never said anything. That would explain it. We were supposed to be going to Jenners last night, for their Christmas shopping evening, and she didn’t turn up, and that’s just not Jo.”

  “And when you tried to phone her — no answer?” Reggie hazarded.

  “Yes, strange, isn’t it? Her phone’s her —”

  “Lifeline?” Reggie supplied.

  “Still,” Sheila said, “an illness in the family, that explains it. An aunt?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s never mentioned an aunt. Is everything okay with you, Reggie?”

  “Totally. Thank you.”

  Lucy Locket lost her pocket, Kitty Fisher found it. From the pocket of her new jacket, Reggie took out the scrap of green blanket that Sadie had retrieved from Dr. Hunter’s front garden. A pocket was where prostitutes kept their money, Dr. Hunter said. (“Nursery rhymes are never what they seem.”) That could be said about a lot of things, in Reggie’s opinion. When Sadie laid the baby’s muddy bit of blanket at her feet, she had been horrified. It belonged with the baby. The baby belonged with Dr. Hunter. The dog belonged with Dr. Hunter. Reggie belonged with Dr. Hunter. It was all wrong. The whole world was wrong. Hard times.

  Pilgrim’s Progress

  He was dreaming. He was walking along a desolate country road, following a woman. It was the strolling woman from the Dales. Still strolling. He shouted to her, “Hey!” and she turned round to look at him. She had no face, just a blank oval like a plate where her features should have been. She was terrifying. He woke up.

  “Nice cup of tea?” a nurse said to him. A nurse (with a face) was putting a cup and saucer on a bed-tray in front of him. And he remembered everything. Not the train crash, not being on the train at all, the last thing he remembered was finding the lost highway, waiting on the access road to the A1, looking for a gap in the traffic.

  But he knew who he was, his name, his history, everything.

  “My name’s Jackson Brodie,” he said to the nurse. “I remember now.”

  “Jackson Brodie? You’re sure?”

  “Sure.”

  Where am I?” Jackson asked a nurse.

  “In the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh,” she said.

  “Edinburgh? Edinburgh, Scotland?” Listen to him, he sounded like an American tourist.

  “Yes, Edinburgh, Scotland,” she affirmed.

  What on earth was he doing in Edinburgh? The scene of some of his greatest defeats in life and love. Why was he in Edinburgh? “I was on my way to London,” he said.

  “You must have gone the wrong way,” she laughed. “Bad luck.”

  He might not know where he had come from, but he knew where he was going. He was going home.

  Edinburgh. Louise was in Edinburgh. A sudden spasm of panic gripped Jackson. No one had looked for him. Did that mean he had not been alone on the train, that perhaps Tessa had joined him at Northallerton and he couldn’t remember? And now she was lying in the hospital somewhere? Or worse?

  Jackson sat bolt upright and grabbed the nurse’s arm.

  “My wife,” he said. “Where’s my wife?”

  “An Elderly Aunt”

  Louise had not joined Neil Hunter in his breakfast whisky, even though, more than most, she appreciated the medicinal taste of a Laphroaig. She could drink most guys under the table if she had to (sometimes you had to), but she had her rules. She never drank and drove anymore, and she never drank on duty — she would have been mortified if anyone at work had smelled whisky on her breath. Only alcoholics smelled of alcohol at nine in the morning. (Her mother. Always.) Instead she picked up a double espresso from a street stall and returned to her office, where she sat in solitary confinement and reviewed, for the hundredth time, all the reported sightings of David Needler.

  The heat had gone out of the case. Louise could feel it growing colder by the day, feel it slipping away. It had been big news for a while and now it was almost as if it had never happened, and it was beginning to feel that it might turn into a never-ending limbo for everyone concerned, one of those cases that detectives brood over for decades. Louise took this extremely negative thought and held it under the waves until it went limp and then forced open her rusted sea chest on the seabed and threw it in.

  There had been no sightings of David Needler at all until they got the case onto Crimewatch, after which they had been deluged by callers claiming to have seen him everywhere from Bangor to Bognor, but not one of them had checked out. The man had disappeared off the radar. He hadn’t used a credit card, hadn’t used his passport. His car was found parked near Flamborough Head, but Louise thought that was the work of someone who believed they were cleverer than the police. She was surprised he hadn’t painted “CLUE” on the side of the car in big black letters. She was disinclined to think that he had killed himself, he wasn’t the type, his sense of self-importance was too great.

  “Hitler killed himself,” Karen Warner said. “He was what you might call self-important.” She was standing in front of Louise’s desk, eating a prawn sandwich from Marks & Spencer that was making Louise feel nauseous.

  “Napoleon didn’t,” Louise said. “Stalin didn’t, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Genghis Khan, Alexander, Caesar. Let’
s face it, Hitler was the exception to the rule.”

  “My, you’re in a mood,” Karen said.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are.” Karen’s stomach was huge. Louise didn’t remember being that big with Archie, he had been tiny, almost premature. Louise blamed herself, she had smoked through the first three months because she had no idea she was pregnant. Louise was sure that buried deep inside her, lurking in the murky labyrinth of her heart, there was an incredibly well-behaved person wondering when she would ever be let out. Patrick probably wondered the same thing. Patient Patrick, waiting for her to come good. Long wait, baby.

  Karen was right, she was especially cranky today. All the coffee had taken the edge off for a while, but now she could feel a headache rolling in like haar up the Forth.

  “Just came to report back on the woman who said she saw David Needler sitting on the harbor wall in Arbroath — ‘eating a fish supper,’ she said.”

  “And?”

  “Tayside police seem doubtful,” she said through a mouthful of food. “No one else remembered him, and when she looked at the photograph again, she wasn’t so sure.”

  “He’s gone underground,” Louise said. “He’s not the kind to be hanging out eating chips in Arbroath.” David Needler was the clever, cunning sort, plus he was English, so he had probably run for the border. And he still had lots of blokey mates down south who might have helped him — they all denied it blind, of course, but a few of them were flush with money, so it wouldn’t have been impossible for him to get abroad. But Louise thought he was still in the UK somewhere, the ordinary guy living next door to someone. Maybe he was already courting another woman.