When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

  If she could, she would run, she would run with the baby, she would run like the wind, until she was safe. She heard footsteps coming up the stairs and held the baby closer. The bad man was coming.

  Reggie Chase, Warrior Virgin

  She had phoned Chief Inspector Monroe three times so far and got no answer. When she phoned Dr. Hunter’s phone, it no longer rang, now a recorded voice on the other end informed Reggie that the number she was trying to reach was currently unavailable. Perhaps it had run out of battery, it must be ailing by now, if not dead. The slender thread that still connected Reggie to Dr. Hunter was broken. Dr. Hunter’s lifeline. Reggie’s too.

  If Reggie could get her hands on Dr. Hunter’s phone, then the so-called aunt would be in her Contacts list. She could phone the aunt and ask to speak to Dr. Hunter. And then Dr. Hunter would answer and Reggie would say — very casual — “Oh, hi, I just wanted to ask when you’d be back. Everything’s fine here. Sadie sends her love.” And Dr. Hunter would say, “Thanks so much for phoning, Reggie. We’re both missing you.” And then all would be right with the world.

  All she had to do was go into the house and find the phone. And if Mr. Hunter came back, she could always say that she’d left something behind, a book, a brush, a key. It wouldn’t be like she was breaking in, technically speaking, you couldn’t break in if you had a key, could you? She had to know that Dr. Hunter was all right.

  She got off the bus on Blackford Avenue and bought a packet of crisps in the Avenue Stores before setting out to walk the rest of the way to Dr. Hunter’s house. The crisps were cheese and onion flavor, and as soon as she tasted them, she had to put them away in her bag because they reminded her too much of the night of the train crash, breathing into Jackson Brodie’s airless lungs, willing him into life.

  There was no Range Rover, which meant that Mr. Hunter wasn’t at home, as the two of them didn’t go anywhere without each other. Reggie crouched down in the bushes and watched to make doubly sure that there was no sign of life in the house. Maybe she should have brought Billy along; for once his talents as a natural born sneak would have come in useful. Billy wasn’t answering his phone either. What was the point of phones if no one ever answered them?

  Sadie gave a whine of homesickness at the sight of the house and Reggie stroked her ears comfortingly and said, “I know, old girl. I know,” the way Dr. Hunter would have done.

  Searching for the Hunters’ door keys, Reggie’s fingers touched the bit of grubby blanket that was nestled in her pocket. A little green flag of distress left for her to interpret, a clue to be tracked, a trail of bread crumbs to follow. How sad the baby must be to lose his talisman. How sad she was to lose the baby.

  “Right,” she whispered to Sadie, and the dog looked at her inquiringly. “Let’s do it.”

  First the mortise, then the Yale, so far so good. In the hallway she paused for a second to check the coast was clear while Sadie raced up the stairs looking for Dr. Hunter, although it was quite plain to Reggie that neither Dr. Hunter nor the baby was here. The house was empty of breath, as quiet as the grave. Dead air. Even the clocks had stopped, with no one here who cared to wind them. The absence of Dr. Hunter from her own house weighed heavily on Reggie’s heart.

  The kitchen was messier now, although there was no sign of Mr. Hunter’s having cooked anything. There were the remains of a pizza and a lot of dirty glasses that he hadn’t bothered to put in the dishwasher. The fridge was still full of the same food that had been in there on Wednesday. The bananas in the fruit bowl were black now, and the apples were beginning to shrivel. There was a large cobweb slung across one corner of the ceiling. It was as if time were accelerating in Dr. Hunter’s absence. How long before the house reverted to some kind of primal state? Before it disappeared altogether and was replaced by field and forest.

  Reggie searched everywhere in the kitchen for the phone — the drawer in the table, all the cupboards, the fridge, the oven — but there was no sign of it anywhere. She was wondering where else to look when she heard the Range Rover approaching, with its usual brutal pace and dramatic finish. It was followed by another equally aggressive-sounding car.

  Car doors slammed and heavy telltale footsteps crunched on the gravel path at the side of the house — they were coming to the back door, to the kitchen. Reggie sprinted up the back stairs, like a scullery maid caught with her hand in the biscuit tin, and ran into Dr. Hunter’s bedroom, where she found her companion in crime asleep on the bed. Sadie woke when Reggie entered the room and gave a little bark of excitement. Reggie jumped on the bed and clamped her hand over the dog’s muzzle. A person could die from a heart attack under this kind of stress.

  She could hear voices down below, in the hallway now. Mr. Hunter and two other men, their voices raised. She couldn’t make out the conversation, but it was moving nearer. They weren’t in the hallway anymore, they were coming up the stairs. A person was definitely going to die of a heart attack in these circumstances. Reggie grabbed hold of Sadie’s collar and tugged at it. “Come on,” she whispered desperately, “we’ve got to hide.” There was, of course, only one place to hide in the bedroom, the louvered closet, the last refuge of the slasher’s innocent victim in horror films. Reggie stepped quickly into Dr. Hunter’s side, pulling a reluctant Sadie in with her.

  There wasn’t enough room to breathe, it was horrible, it was like going into Narnia, except there was no other world beyond, just Dr. Hunter’s clothes, pressed up against Reggie’s face, all smelling of Dr. Hunter’s perfume. Reggie’s heart wasn’t even in her chest anymore, it was too big and too loud to fit anymore, it was filling the whole of the bedroom. Boom, boom, boom.

  The men were having a conversation with Mr. Hunter on the landing outside the open bedroom door. Through the slats in the closet door Reggie could see the back of one of them. He was big, bigger than Mr. Hunter, and was wearing a leather jacket. She could see the thick trunk of his bull neck and his bald head. There was a big, shiny gold watch on his wrist and he tapped the dial ostentatiously and said to Mr. Hunter, “Time’s running out, Neil.” Another Glaswegian by the sound of him.

  They must be able to hear her heart from where they were standing, a great big drum of sound banging away in the closet, boom, boom, boom. Any moment one of them would yank the doors open to find the source of the noise. Reggie stretched out her fingers and felt the soft fur on top of Sadie’s head for comfort.

  “I’m doing my fucking best,” Mr. Hunter said, and the man with the gold wristwatch said, “You know the score, Hunter. You and yours. Think about it. Sweet little wife, pretty little baby. Do you want to see them again? Because it’s your call. What do you want me to tell Anderson?”

  Sadie gave a low growl, upset by the proximity of so much nasty human testosterone. Reggie crouched lower and put her arms round her in an effort to keep her quiet. “Right!” Mr. Hunter shouted, and suddenly he was in the bedroom, halfway across the floor to the closet. Reggie thought her heart was going to explode all over the bedroom and they would find it, like a burst balloon, on the floor of the closet. He opened the door on his own side, pulling on it aggressively, so that Reggie could feel the whole closet shake. He threw things around, looking for something and must have found it, because he left and the men followed him downstairs. Reggie laid her face against Sadie’s big body and listened to the dog’s heartbeat, solid and regular, unlike her own fluttery organ. The back door slammed and first one and then the other car started its engine and both drove away. Reggie rushed to the window in time to see Mr. Hunter’s Range Rover following a monstrous black Nissan. She repeated the license number over and over again until she could grab a notebook and pen from her bag and write it down.

  The air in the house felt polluted by the conversation she had just heard. On the one hand it was very bad — the man with the gold wristwatch seemed to have kidnapped Dr. Hunter and the baby — but on the other, good hand, they weren’t dead. Yet.

  Climbing cautiously out of the clos
et, Reggie almost tripped on something on the floor inside it — Dr. Hunter’s expensive Mulberry handbag. (“The Bayswater — isn’t it handsome, Reggie?”) Reggie snatched it up and said to Sadie, “Come on, we have to go.”

  Reggie caught a relay of buses. While still inoculated against fear by her experience in Dr. Hunter’s house, she was going to go back to her flat in Gorgie. Her phone was about to run out of battery, and if nothing else she could salvage her phone charger.

  She sat on the top deck, holding Dr. Hunter’s black Bayswater on her lap, investigating the contents. Technically theft of course, but Reggie didn’t feel that the normal rules applied anymore. “Sweet little wife, pretty little baby. Do you want to see them again?” Every time she thought of those words her insides hollowed out. They had been kidnapped, that was what had happened to them. They were being held to ransom by gold-watch-wearing Glaswegians. Why? Where? (And what did the aunt have to do with it?)

  The innards of the handbag seemed complete — a hairbrush, a packet of mints, a small packet of tissues, a packet of baby wipes, a copy of That’s Not My Teddy, a small torch, a granola bar, a Ventolin inhaler, a packet of birth control pills, a Chanel powder compact, Dr. Hunter’s driving spectacles, and her purse and — fat to bursting — her Filofax.

  Now surely Inspector Monroe would believe her? Dr. Hunter wouldn’t go away without her driving spectacles, her purse, or her inhaler (the spare one was still on the dressing table). No aunt could be so sick that you left everything behind. The only thing missing was her phone, but that didn’t matter anymore because inside the Filofax was an address for an Agnes Barker in Hawes. The mysterious Aunt Agnes, found at last.

  Reggie got off the bus and turned the corner of the street to find that the all-too-familiar calling cards of catastrophe were waiting for her — three fire engines, an ambulance, two police cars, some kind of incident van, and a knot of bystanders — all muddled up in the street outside her flat. Reggie’s heart sank, it seemed inevitable that they would be there for her.

  All the glass in the windows of her flat was broken, and black streaks of soot marked where flames had shot out from the living room. A horrible smell still lingered in the air. A thick hose like a boa constrictor snaked into the close. The paramedics were leaning nonchalantly against the bonnet of their ambulance rather than trying to revive her charred neighbors, so hopefully Reggie wasn’t going to have the deaths of everyone in the building on her conscience as well. Reggie’s life was like the Ilian plain, littered with the dead.

  “What happened?” she asked a young boy who was gazing in awe at the aftermath of disaster.

  “Fire,” he said.

  “Duh. But what happened?”

  Another boy leaned into the conversation and said excitedly, “Someone poured petrol through the letter box.”

  “Of which flat?” Please don’t say number eight, she thought.

  “Number eight.”

  Reggie thought of the books piled on the living-room floor like a bonfire waiting to be lit. All her schoolwork, Danielle Steel, Mum’s miniature teapots. Virgil, Tacitus, good old Pliny (Young and Old), all the Penguin Classics she’d rescued from charity shops. Photographs.

  “Oh,” Reggie said. A little sound. A little round sound. Weightless as a wren. A breath. “Was anyone hurt?”

  “Nah,” the first boy said, looking disappointed.

  “Reggie!” Mr. Hussain said, appearing suddenly from out of the crowd. “Are you all right?”

  A piece of charred paper floated slowly down from the sky like a soiled snowflake. Mr. Hussain picked it up and read out loud, “He felt the heart still fluttering beneath the bark.”

  “Sounds like Ovid,” Reggie said.

  “I was worried you were in there,” Mr. Hussain said. “Come into the shop, I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

  “No, really, I’m okay. Thanks anyway, Mr. Hussain.”

  “Sure?”

  “Sweartogod.”

  A fireman who looked as if he was in charge came out of the building and said to a policeman, “All clear in there.” Firemen began to coil up the fat hosepipe from out of the close. Reggie saw the good-looking Asian policeman, who gave a twitch of recognition at the sight of her, as if he knew her but couldn’t place her. She turned away before he remembered who she was.

  She turned up her collar and hunched herself into her jacket and walked away briskly, Sadie at her heels. She had no idea where she was going, she was just walking, away from the flat, away from Gorgie. It took her a moment to realize that she was being followed by a white van, which was curb-crawling along behind her in a really creepy way. She picked up the pace, so did the van. She started running, Sadie lolloping along excitedly as if it were a game. The van accelerated too and cut her off at the next crossroad. Blondie and Ginger climbed out. They both walked with a bowlegged swagger, like apes.

  They stood intimidatingly close to her, she could smell Ginger’s breath, meaty, like a dog’s. Close up, Blondie’s skin was even worse, pitted and pocked like a barren moon.

  “Are you Reggie Chase’s sister, Billy?” Blondie demanded.

  “Whose sister?” Reggie asked, frowning innocently. As if she didn’t know, as if she weren’t poor Reggie Chase, sister of the Artful Dodger. (As if she weren’t all the poor unwanted girls, the Florences, the Esthers, the Cecilia Jupes.)

  “That wee shite Reggie Chase’s sister,” Ginger said impatiently. Sadie growled at his tone of voice and the two men seemed to notice the dog for the first time, which was pretty slow of them considering how big she was, but then, they didn’t look like they’d been at the front of the queue when brains were being handed out.

  Ginger took a step back.

  “She’s a trained attack dog,” Reggie said hopefully. Sadie growled again.

  Blondie took a step back.

  “Give your brother a message,” Ginger said. “Tell the wee cunt that if he doesn’t come up with the goods, if he doesn’t give back what isn’t his then —” He made a slashing motion across his throat. The pair of them really did like miming weapons.

  Sadie started to bark in a way that even Reggie found quite alarming and both Blondie and Ginger retreated into the van. Ginger rolled down the passenger window and said, “Give him this,” and threw something at her. Another Loeb, a red one this time, the Aeneid, Volume One. It flew through the air, its pages fluttering, and hit Reggie square on her cheekbone before dropping and spread-eagling on its spine on the pavement.

  She picked it up. Same neat hole cut into its center. She ran a finger around the sides of the little paper coffin. Was someone hiding secrets inside Ms. MacDonald’s Loeb Classics? All of them? Or only the ones that she needed for her A level? The cutout hole was the work of someone who was good with his hands. Someone who might have had a future as a joiner but instead became a street dealer hanging around on corners, pale and shifty. He was higher up the pyramid now, but Billy was someone with no sense of loyalty. Someone who would take from the hand that fed him, and hide what he took in secret little boxes.

  Reggie didn’t mean to cry, but she was so tired and so small and her face hurt where the book had hit it and the world was so full of big men telling people they were dead. “Sweet little wife, pretty little baby.”

  Where did a person go when they had no one to turn to and nowhere left to run?

  Jackson Leaves the Building

  There were some metal staples in his forehead that gave him a passing resemblance to Frankenstein’s monster. His bandaged left arm was strapped to his chest in a sling that kept his hand pledged on his heart all the time, which was one way of making sure that you were alive. He had a recurrent vision of the artery inside his arm rupturing and spilling his blood again. But he was no longer fettered to a hospital bed. He was free. A little groggy, very sore — some of his bruises could have won competitions — but basically on the road to being a fully functioning human again.

  He had to get out. Jackson hated hospitals. He had
spent more time in them than most people. He had watched his mother take an eternity to die in one, and as a police constable he had spent nearly every Saturday night taking statements in Accident and Emergency. Birth, death (the one as traumatic as the other), injury, disease — hospitals weren’t healthy places to hang around in. Too many sick people. Jackson wasn’t sick, he was repaired, and he wanted to go home, or at least to the place he called home now, which was the tiny but exquisite flat in Covent Garden containing the priceless jewel that was his wife, or would contain her when she stepped off the plane at Heathrow on Monday morning. Not his real home; his real home, the one he never named anymore, was the dark and sooty chamber in his heart that contained his sister and his brother and, because it was an accommodating kind of space, the entire filthy history of the industrial revolution. It was amazing how much dark matter you could crush inside the black hole of the heart.

  Whenever Jackson started to get fanciful, he knew it must be time to go. “I’m better now,” he said to Dr. Foster.

  “They all say that.”

  “No, really. I am.”

  “The clue is in the word patient.”

  “I don’t need to be in hospital.”

  “Yesterday you were going on about how you died and today you’re ready to walk? Roll away the stone? Just like that?”