When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

  “She took it with her, I told you that.”

  “Only there’s never an answer from Dr. Hunter’s mobile when I call it,” Louise said innocently (or as innocently as she could muster). She dialed a number on her own phone and held it aloft demonstrating her inability to reach Joanna Hunter. A few seconds later, the tinny, muffled Bach started up. Neil Hunter stared at the wooden table as if it had just kicked up its legs and danced the can can. Louise opened the drawer and took out the phone.

  “Fancy that. Jo left it behind, can you believe?” he said. He wasn’t as good at mugging innocence as Louise. “Honest to God, my wife can be so forgetful sometimes.” (What had the girl said? “Dr. Hunter never forgets anything.”)

  “You haven’t spoken to her, then?”

  “Who?”

  “Your wife, Mr. Hunter.”

  “Of course I have, I told you I had. I must have phoned her on the aunt’s number.” He handed over a piece of paper with an address and phone number on it. The aunt.

  “When?” Louise asked.

  “Yesterday.”

  “Do you mind if I take her mobile?”

  “Take her mobile?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Take her mobile.”

  She was parked outside Alison Needler’s house, drinking a takeaway coffee.

  Agnes Barker. The elderly aunt, like a character in a farce, not a real person at all (Enter stage left, An Elderly Aunt). The aunt was seventy, not that old, not these days. Old age receded the closer you got to it. Live fast, die young, Louise used to joke, but it was hard to move fast when you were hampered by linen chests and silver napkin rings, not to mention having voluntarily shackled yourself to one man for the rest of your life. Was that what they meant by wedlock? One good man, she reminded herself.

  Trawling the Net, Louise had come up with some scant details about Agnes Barker — born Agnes Mary Mason in 1936, went to RADA, trod the boards in rep for a few years, married an Oliver Barker, a radio producer with the BBC, in 1965. Lived in Ealing, no children. Retired to Hawes in 1990, husband died ten years ago.

  There had been a sister called Margot in The Shopkeeper — an uppity, snobbish girl — Agnes’s fictional alter ego, presumably. Louise was beginning to feel she could go on Mastermind and answer questions on “The Life and Works of Howard Mason.”

  Arty sister of an arty brother. In The Shopkeeper, Margot was still at school but had “foolishly unrealistic” dreams of fame and success.

  There wasn’t a reason in the world to doubt either the existence of the aunt or the aunt’s veracity. Except that when she examined Joanna Hunter’s phone, as she was doing now, and checked it against the number that Neil Hunter had reluctantly given her for the aunt, there were no calls to or from Agnes Barker, no calls from Hawes at all. Perhaps Joanna Hunter and her husband were using the aunt as some kind of cover, to give Joanna Hunter some space. For her escape. Long odds.

  Joanna Hunter had made six calls on Wednesday and received five. On Thursday she had received — or at least the phone had received — several calls. She fished out Reggie Chase’s number, and, not surprisingly, most of them were from her. Any further investigation of Joanna Hunter’s phone proved impossible as the battery, on its last gasp, finally gave up on life.

  She phoned Agnes Barker’s home number and a politely robotic voice informed her that this number was no longer in use. She phoned the station, got hold of the handiest DC, and asked him to find out when the number was disconnected. He came back in a snappy ten minutes and said, “Last week, boss.” Disconnected and out of print. The Masons were like an illusion, all smoke and mirrors.

  Louise flicked through the new Howard Mason novel, The Way Home, written a couple of years after his marriage to Gabrielle. The wife in the novel was called Francesca and had some kind of exotic parentage and a cosmopolitan upbringing, a world away from the novel’s protagonist, Stephen, brought up in a claustrophobic West Yorkshire mill town — all dirty canals and soot-blackened skylines. (Louise wondered what Jackson would make of Howard’s book.)

  Stephen, having escaped his inheritance of northern misery, was now living a gypsy life with his new schoolgirl wife — he had eloped with her — amongst the bohemian enclaves of Europe. There seemed to be an incredible amount of sex in the novel, on every other page Stephen and Francesca were going at it like rabbits, sucking and bucking and arching. Louise supposed it was all that fucking that had made Howard Mason fashionable in — she checked the publication date — 1960. Louise yawned. It was amazing how tedious reading about sex could be at this time of the day, any time of the day, in fact.

  The Needlers’ front door opened and Alison poked her head out and checked the coast was clear before reappearing with the kids a couple of minutes later. She marshaled them down the street to school as if they were an unruly pack of dogs but in reality they were as docile as zombies. Between the four of them, the Needlers were on a pharmacopoeia of downers and uppers. Louise started up the BMW’s engine and drove slowly behind them, peeling away once they were through the school gates. Alison Needler acknowledged Louise’s presence with an almost imperceptible nod of her head.

  It was still dark, they were hurtling towards the winter solstice and it was going to be one of those days when the sun never got out of bed. Louise checked her watch, the surgery where Joanna Hunter worked would be in full swing by the time she got back to Edinburgh. She started the engine and set off again. Louise wondered how many miles she’d have on the BMW’s clock when she finally felt she could stop moving.

  No word from Dr. Hunter at the surgery, no word since first thing Thursday morning, when the practice had been apprised of her sudden leave of absence. Louise finally managed to track down the receptionist who had taken the call and phoned her from the car, parked outside the surgery. It was the receptionist’s day off and she sounded as if she was already out Christmas shopping. “I’m in the Gyle,” she said, her voice raised against a Slade track. The woman sounded understandably harassed, Louise would have been harassed if she had been Christmas shopping in the Gyle. What was she going to buy Patrick for Christmas? Archie was easy, he wanted cash (“Lots, please”), but Patrick would expect something personal, something with meaning. Louise was no good with presents, she didn’t know how either to receive or to give. And not just presents.

  “No,” the receptionist said, after a moment’s hesitation. “Not Dr. Hunter, it was her husband who phoned. He said there’d been a family emergency.”

  “You’re sure it was her husband?”

  “Well, he said he was. He was Glaswegian,” she added as if that clinched it. “She’s gone to look after a sick aunt.”

  “Yeah,” Louise said. “I heard that.”

  Sheila Hayes was running a prenatal clinic at the end of the corridor. It unnerved Louise to be amongst so much fecundity, it was bad enough working around Karen, but in the prenatal clinic, the air in the waiting room was saturated with hormones as a roomful of fertility goddesses the size of buses leafed through old, dog-eared copies of OK! and shifted their uncomfortable bulk around on the hard chairs.

  Louise showed her warrant card to the receptionist and said, “Sheila Hayes?” and the receptionist pointed at a door and said, “She has a lady in with her.” More ladies. Ladies of the lake, the lamp, the night. Louise waited until a woman lumbered out, already trammeled by two small infants, and slipped into the midwife’s room.

  Sheila Hayes smiled a welcome at her and glancing down at her notes said, “Mrs. Carter? I don’t think we’ve met before.”

  “Not Mrs. Carter,” Louise said, showing her warrant card, “Chief Inspector Louise Monroe.” Sheila Hayes’s professional smile faded. “It’s a question about Dr. Hunter.”

  “Something’s happened to her?”

  “No. I’m conducting a routine investigation into her husband’s affairs —”

  “Neil?”

  “Yes, Neil. I’d rather you didn’t say anything about this to anyone.”
r />   “Of course not.”

  Louise supposed it would be all round the surgery before she was even out of the door. The receptionist was already agog at the sight of her warrant card. “I’m trying to locate Dr. Hunter. She didn’t tell you she was going away?”

  “No,” Sheila Hayes said. “She’s gone to stay with an aunt apparently, according to Reggie — Reggie’s the girl who helps to look after the baby. Jo was supposed to meet me on Wednesday night but she didn’t turn up, didn’t answer her phone when I called to find out what happened. It’s very out of character for her, but I suppose it’s something to do with the story in the newspaper?”

  “What story?”

  Which do you prefer,” Karen Warner said, “ ‘Mason Murderer Missing’ or ‘Beast of Bodmin Moor.’ It wasn’t Bodmin Moor.”

  “Scottish paper,” Louise said, “bound to be hazy on English geography.”

  “ ‘After serving a full thirty-year life sentence for the brutal slaying,’ blah, blah, blah. ‘Face of a killer.’ This photo’s over thirty years old. ‘Joanna Mason, changed her name, believed to be working as a GP in Scotland,’ diddum, diddum . . . They haven’t found her yet, then. Close on her heels, though.”

  “I kind of wish they would,” Louise said. “Find her.”

  “Do you?”

  A DC called Abbie Nash popped her head round the door and said, “Boss? You wanted me?”

  “Yes, phone round the rental companies to check whether a Joanna Hunter rented a car on Wednesday. And Abbie,” Louise said, handing her Joanna Hunter’s phone, “can you get someone else to run all the numbers on this mobile, also Joanna Hunter’s.”

  “Right away, boss.” Abbie was a short, stocky young woman who looked as if she would hold her own in a fight. She was more imaginative than her badly cut hair suggested. “Sandy Mathieson says she’s the Mason massacre survivor,” she said. “I Googled her when he told me about her. Rumor is she’s lost again.”

  Louise wondered how many people had to die before murder became massacre. More than three, surely?

  “Crisp?” Karen offered, rattling an open packet at them both. “Roast beef flavor.” Abbie Nash took a handful, but Louise waved the crisps away, even the smell made her nauseous. This must be how people became vegetarians.

  “I just want to know where she is and if she’s okay,” Louise said. “And I want to make sure that Andrew Decker’s nowhere near her.”

  What had Reggie said? “Has anyone actually spoken to her?” No, apparently not. “Trouble is, she’s a missing person that no one’s reported missing.” Louise sighed. “I think it’s a case of cherchez la tante.”

  The thing was, as Reggie Chase would have said, Neil Hunter’s reaction to the perplexing presence of his wife’s phone in the house was worthy of Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight but wasn’t nearly as hammy as his response to the sound of the Prius’s engine purring happily when Louise started it. “Miracle recovery?” she said innocently to Neil Hunter.

  He tried to laugh it off. “Do I need a lawyer?” he joked.

  “I don’t know. Do you?” she said.

  Abide with Me

  She was nine when Martina died. She came home from school — there was no sign of her father — and found two men carrying a sheet-draped body downstairs on a stretcher. Joanna wasn’t sure who it was until she ran upstairs to Martina’s room and saw the tumbled sheets, the empty bottles lying on the floor, and smelled something sickly in the air that hinted at disaster.

  The note that Martina had left was written on a flowery card, part of a stationery set that had been Joanna’s Christmas present to her. It was on the dining-room mantelpiece and had been overlooked by the police. It contained nothing memorable, no poetry, just a sleepy scrawl that said “Too much” and something in Swedish that would forever remain untranslated for Joanna.

  She had gone looking for her father, found him in his study, where he had worked his way down to the bottom of a bottle of whisky. She stood in the doorway and held up the card. “Martina left you a note,” she said, and he said, “I know,” and threw the bottle of whisky at her.

  So then it was just Joanna and her father for a while. At first, when she had gone to live with him, after everyone she loved had died, he had employed a nanny, a dried-up stick of a witch in severe clothes who believed that the best way for Joanna to get over her tragedy was to behave as if it had never happened.

  It was a long time before Joanna was able to go to school. Her legs would collapse under her every time she got near the school gates, and the psychiatrist that her father employed (a tweedy man who smelled of cigarettes and with whom she shared long, awkward silences) suggested she be schooled at home for a while, and so the nanny did double duty as a governess and gave Joanna lessons every day, terrible, tedious hours of arithmetic and English. If she did anything wrong, if she smudged her exercise books or didn’t pay attention, she was smacked across the back of her hand with a ruler. When one day Martina caught the nanny midwhack, she grabbed the ruler and hit her across the face with it.

  There was a terrible fuss, the nanny talked about getting the police involved, but Howard must have got rid of her somehow. He was good at getting rid of women. All Joanna remembered was Martina turning to her after the woman had left in a taxi, saying, “No more nannies, darling. I’ll look after you from now on. I promise.” “Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” their mother used to say, and she was right. She didn’t used to say it to her children, she said it mainly to their father, Howard Mason, the Great Pretender.

  The woman who came after the poet (who, in truth, came before the poet, which was one of the reasons Martina lay down with her bottles of salvation) was Chinese, some kind of artist from Hong Kong, who assured Howard that Joanna would be happier not at the local school, where she had finally settled, but at a boarding school buried deep in the folds of the Cotswolds, and so Joanna was duly packed off until she was eighteen, coming home only for holidays.

  Her father spent years in exile in Los Angeles, trying to make a new career, and she spent the school holidays with Aunt Agnes and Uncle Oliver, dreadful people who were terrified of children and treated her as if she were a dangerous wild animal to be harried and contained at every turn. Now their contact was limited to the exchange of Christmas cards. Joanna could never forgive her aunt for not wrapping her in love, the way she would have done in her place.

  It was only because she saw an obituary in the newspaper that she knew her own father was dead. His fifth, forgetful wife had omitted to tell her and had him cremated and scattered before Joanna even knew he’d finally gone. He was living in Rio when he died, like a criminal or a Nazi. The fifth wife was Brazilian, and Howard might have neglected to tell her that he had a daughter.

  She could have sunk, but school made up for the Masons’ shortcomings. By sheer chance Howard put her into a boarding school that fostered her and cared for her, and in return she proved buoyant, embracing school life with the order of its days and the comfort of its rules.

  By the time Joanna left school for university, Howard had worked his way through another wife and a couple of mistresses, but he never had any more children. “I had my children,” he would drunkenly declare in company, like a grandstanding tragic actor. “They are not replaceable.”

  “You still have Joanna,” someone would remind him, and he would say, “Yes, of course. Thank God, I still have Joanna.”

  There were ten in the bed,” she sang quietly to the baby, even though he was asleep. “And the little one said, ‘Roll over, roll over.’ ” He had fallen asleep easily on the lumpy mattress they were sharing but woke as usual at four in the morning for a feed. The time of night when people died and were born, when the body offered least resistance to the coming and going of the soul. Joanna didn’t believe in God, how could she, but she believed in the existence of the soul, believed indeed in the transference of the soul, and although she wouldn’t have stood up at a scientific conference and declared it, she
also believed that she carried the souls of her dead family inside her and one day the baby would do the same for her. Just because you were a rational and skeptical atheist didn’t mean that you didn’t have to get through every day the best way you could. There were no rules.

  The best days of her life had been when she was pregnant and the baby was still safe inside her. Once you were out in the world, then the rain fell on your face and the wind lifted your hair and the sun beat down on you and the path stretched ahead of you and evil walked on it.

  It was black night outside, a winter-white moon rising. The baby was the same age as Joseph was when he died. His foot stopped short when he was so young that it was impossible to imagine what kind of a man Joseph would have become if he had lived. Jessica was easier, her character already fixed at the age of eight. Loyal, resourceful, confident, annoying. Clever, too clever sometimes. “Too clever for her own good,” their father said, but their mother said, “That’s impossible. Especially for a girl.” Did they really say those things? Was she just making it up to fill in the gaps, the same way that she imagined (ludicrously, a daydream shared with no one) a Jessica living in the present, a parallel universe in the Cotswolds, in an old house with wisteria strung out along the front wall. Four children, a government adviser on Third World policies. Argumentative. Brave. Reliable. And her mother, living somewhere dazzling with sunshine, painting like a crazy woman, the eccentric English artist.

  All made up, of course. She couldn’t really remember any of them, but that didn’t stop them from still possessing a reality that was stronger than anything alive, apart from the baby, of course. They were the touchstone to which everything else must look and the exemplar compared to which everything else failed. Except for the baby.

  She was bereft, her whole life an act of bereavement, longing for something that she could no longer remember. Sometimes in the night, in dreams, she heard their old dog barking and it brought back a memory of grief so raw that it led her to wonder about killing the baby, and then herself, both of them slipping away on something as peaceful as poppies so that nothing hideous could ever happen to him. A contingency plan for when you were cornered, for when you couldn’t run. A famine or a nuclear war. The volcano erupting, the comet dropping to earth. If she was in a concentration camp. Or kidnapped by evil psychopaths. If there were no needles, if there was nothing, she would hold her hand over the baby’s face and then she would hang herself. You could always find a way to hang yourself. Sometimes it took a lot of self-discipline. Elsie Marley’s grown so fine, she won’t get up to feed the swine.