When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  I’m okay to leave now,” Jackson said to the boy-wizard doctor.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “No, no, no, you missed the sarcastic inflection. Listen again — Really?”

  Pumped-up little Potter pillock.

  I’m A-OK,” Jackson said to Australian Mike. “I need to get out of this place, it’s doing my head in.”

  “No worries,” the Flying Doctor said.

  “Does that mean I can go?”

  “Knock yourself out, mate. Discharge yourself. What’s stopping you?”

  “I haven’t got any money. Or a driving license.” (The latter seemed more important than the former.)

  “Bummer.”

  “I haven’t even got any clothes.”

  They’re your size,” Reggie said, indicating a large Topman bag at her feet. “I went to Topman because I’ve got a store card. It might not really be your style. I bought you one of everything.” She looked embarrassed. “And three pairs of underpants.” She looked even more embarrassed. “Boxers. I took the size from your old clothes, the nurse gave them to me. They were ruined, they had to cut them off you, and anyway they were covered in blood. I’ve got them in a black plastic bag, you probably want to throw them away.”

  “Why did they give you my clothes?” Jackson puzzled when she paused for breath.

  “I said I was your daughter.”

  “My daughter?”

  “Sorry.”

  “And you’re doing this because you’re responsible for me?”

  “Well, actually . . . ,” Reggie said, “it’s more of a two-way thing.”

  “I knew there had to be a catch,” Jackson said. There was always a catch. Since Adam turned to Eve (or more likely the other way round) and said, “Oh, by the way, I wondered if . . .”

  She had another fresh bruise, on her cheek this time. What did she do when she wasn’t visiting him? Karate?

  “You used to be a private detective. Right?” she said.

  “Amongst other things.”

  “So you used to find people?”

  “Sometimes. I also lost people.”

  “I want to hire you.”

  “No.”

  “Please.”

  “No. I don’t do that anymore.”

  “I really need your help, Mr. Brodie.”

  No, Jackson thought, don’t ask for my help. People who asked for his help always led him down paths he didn’t want to tread. Paths that led to the town called Trouble.

  “And so does Dr. Hunter,” she went on relentlessly. “And so does her baby.”

  “You’re changing the rules as you go along,” Jackson said. “First it was ‘you save me, I save you.’ Now I have to save complete strangers?”

  “They’re not strangers to me. I think they’ve been kidnapped.”

  “Kidnapped?” Now she was getting really extreme.

  He knew what she was going to say. Don’t say it. Don’t say the magic words.

  “They need your help.”

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  We should start with the aunt.”

  “What aunt?”

  V

  And Tomorrow

  The Prodigal Wife

  According to her Sat Nav it was a hundred and sixty-one miles to Hawes and should take them three hours and twenty-three minutes, “So let’s see,” Louise said combatively as she started up the engine. Marcus, riding shotgun, gave her a salute and said, “Chocks away.” An innocent. He was handsome, polished, and new, like something just out of a chrysalis. Archie would never look like that at Marcus’s age. Technically, she was old enough to be Marcus’s mother. If she’d been a careless schoolgirl.

  She hadn’t been careless, she was on the Pill by the age of fourteen. Throughout her teens she had sex with older men, she hadn’t realized at the time how pervy they must have been. Then she was flattered by their attentions, now she’d have them all arrested.

  With Patrick, in their courting period, when they were exchanging all those little intimacies of a life — favorite films and books, pets you’d had (“Paddy” and “Bridie,” needless to say, had been the keepers of a childhood menagerie of hamsters, guinea pigs, dogs, cats, tortoises, and rabbits), where you’d been on holiday (pretty much nowhere in Louise’s case), how you lost your virginity and who with — he told her that he met Samantha during Freshers’ week at Trinity College, “And that was it.” “But before that?” she said, and he shrugged and said, “Just a couple of local girls at home. Nice girls.” Three. Three sexual partners until he was widowed (all nice). There’d been girlfriends after Samantha but nothing serious, nothing indecorous. “And you?” he asked. He had no idea how sexually incontinent Louise had been in her life and she wasn’t about to enlighten him. “Oh,” she said, blowing air out of her mouth. “A handful of guys — if that — pretty long-term relationships, really. Lost my virginity at eighteen to a boy I’d been going out with for a couple of years.” Liar, liar, pants on fire. Louise was ever a good deceiver, she often thought that in another life she would have made an excellent con woman. Who knows, maybe even in this life, it wasn’t over yet, after all.

  She should have told the truth. She should have told the truth about everything. She should have said, “I have no idea how to love another human being unless it’s by tearing them to pieces and eating them.”

  A bit of fresh country air to blow away the cobwebs,” she said to Marcus. “Just what the doctor ordered.”

  Or, on the other hand, not. “Late again?” Patrick said when she phoned to tell him about their “wee jaunt” (as Marcus insisted on calling it). “Couldn’t you get the local police to pay this aunt a visit?” he said. “It seems a long way to go just to check this thing out. It’s not as if it’s a case, it’s not official, is it? Nothing’s happened.”

  “I don’t tell you how to do surgery, Patrick,” she snapped, “so I would really appreciate it if you didn’t instruct me in police procedure. Okay?” He had taken her on, thinking she would improve, get better under his patient care, he must be disappointed in her by now. The rose with the worm, the bowl with the crack. Nothing the doctor can do here.

  “You’re pissed off with me,” she continued, “because I got drunk on my own last night instead of coming to the ‘theater,’ aren’t you?” She put a camp emphasis on theater as if it were something boring and middle class, as if she were Archie at his adolescent worst.

  “I’m not accusing you of being drunk,” Patrick said placidly, not rising to the argument. “You’re doing that yourself.” Louise wondered about killing him. Simpler than divorce and it would give her a whole new set of problems to be challenged with instead of the tediously familiar old ones. She wondered if there was a part of Howard Mason that had been relieved when his family was conveniently erased. Just Joanna left, a permanent marker. Much better for him if she’d been wiped out as well.

  “Don’t get so het up,” Patrick said. “That Scottish chip on your shoulder is getting in the way.”

  “In the way of what?”

  “Your better self. You’re your own worst enemy, you know.”

  She bit down on the snarl that was her instinctive response and muttered, “Yeah, well, I’ve got a lot on my mind. Sorry,” she added. “Sorry.”

  “Me too,” Patrick said and Louise wondered if she should read more into that statement.

  They had crossed the border. Over the Tweed and under the wire. Frontier country.

  “English rules apply now,” she said to Marcus.

  “Wild aunt chase,” he said happily. “Shall we have some music on, boss?” He inspected the Maria Callas compilation in the CD player and said doubtfully, “Jings and help me Bob, boss. Not really road-trip music, is it? I’ve got a couple of discs with me.” He raked around in the rucksack he always had with him and retrieved a CD-carrying case and unzipped it. “Be prepared,” he said. Yes, of course, he would
have been a Boy Scout. The sort of boy who relished being able to tie knots and light a fire with a couple of sticks. The kind of boy any mother would like to have. And she would bet her bottom dollar that he had joined the police because he wanted to help, to “make a difference.”

  “Why did you join the police, Marcus?”

  “Oh, you know, usual reasons. Wanted to try and make a difference, I suppose, help people. What about you, boss?”

  “So I could hit people with a big stick.”

  He laughed, an uncomplicated sound that wasn’t freighted with years of cynicism. Louise tried to guess what kind of music he thought suitable for a “road trip.” He was too young for Springsteen, too old for the Tweenies, the baby’s preferred drive-time sound track. (Funny how she too now automatically thought of Joanna Hunter’s baby as simply the baby.) Marcus was twenty-six, so he still probably liked the same stuff as Archie — Snow Patrol, Kaiser Chiefs, Arctic Monkeys — but no, the BMW’s music system was being polluted by James Blunt, prince of easy listening. She leaned over and with one hand grabbed the CD case and emptied it onto Marcus’s lap, disgorging Corinne Bailey Rae, Norah Jones, Jack Johnson, Katie Melua. “Jesus, Marcus,” she said. “You’re too young to die yet.”

  “Boss?”

  She swapped places with him at Washington services. In the shop two Red Tops carried the story about Decker being missing. “Freed Killer Flees.” Assonance and alliteration, you had to hand it to these guys.

  “You kind of have to feel sorry for the guy,” Marcus said. “After all, he’s paid his dues et cetera, but he’s still being punished.”

  “What are you, Mother Teresa?”

  “No, but he was brought to justice, he paid, should he pay forever?”

  “Yes. Forever,” Louise said. “And then some. Don’t worry,” she added, “when you’re my age, you’ll be hard and unfeeling too.”

  “Expect I will, boss.”

  Never driven a Beemer before,” he said, getting into the driving seat and adjusting it. “Cool. Why aren’t we taking a police car?”

  “Because we’re not on police business. Not strictly speaking. It’s your day off, it’s my day off. We’re going for a drive.”

  “Quite a long one.”

  “Just be careful with the car, Scout.”

  “Yes, boss. Off we go. To infinity and beyond!”

  He was a good driver, good enough — almost — for her to relax. Almost. So, elderly aunt, here we come, ready or not, Louise thought. The impostor aunt. The farce had grown more farcical. Except it wasn’t funny, but then farces rarely were in Louise’s opinion, she was drawn more to revenge tragedies. Patrick, surprisingly (or perhaps not), liked Restoration comedy. And Wagner. Should you marry a man who liked Wagner?

  The first time a teenage Howard Mason went to a concert was to a performance of Handel’s Messiah given by the Bradford Choral Society and he had wept during the Hallelujah Chorus. Or was she getting him mixed up with one of his alter egos, his fictional doppelgängers?

  The book he was writing in Devon, in the winter before the murders took place, was called The Brass Band Plays On, and the protagonist was a struggling playwright (northern, naturally) who was hobbled by domesticity in the form of two small daughters and a wife who had made him move to the country. There was no second, fictional self for the baby, Joseph; Howard Mason’s baby son seemed to have escaped being pinned to the page.

  After the murders Howard stopped writing his way through his life and moved to Los Angeles, where he worked on a handful of screenplays for unsuccessful movies. (Where was Joanna during this time?) When his screenwriting career went nowhere, Howard had hung out around a swimming pool in Laurel Canyon, producing a pedestrian collection of stories centered on a Brit writer working in Hollywood. Fitzgerald it wasn’t. What Howard Mason never wrote (what he never even talked about) was a novel about a man whose family was murdered while he was off dallying with his Swedish mistress. He missed an opportunity there, it would probably have been a best seller.

  She had collected three phone messages from Reggie already today. They were all agitated, one of them was a car license plate number (“a black Nissan Pathfinder,” the girl was a better witness than most) and she caught the name “Anderson” in the middle of one particularly breathless communiqué. She felt a stab of guilt. Reggie’s fantasies were all proving to be grounded in reality, but kidnap — really? (“Kidnapped! Dr. Hunter’s been kidnapped.”) Crazy, crazy talk.

  The third message was an itemization of the contents of Joanna Hunter’s handbag, which Reggie had found in her bedroom — “Her driving specs, how can she have driven without them? Her inhaler. Her purse!” Louise’s headache bloomed, and she imagined her brain looked like an atomic explosion, the mushroom growing larger, pressing against the hard plates of her skull. She closed her eyes and pushed her fists into her eye sockets. She had an awful feeling that Reggie Chase might be right, something bad had happened to Joanna Hunter.

  “Get someone to run a license number,” she said to Marcus.

  “Why exactly are we worried about this aunt, boss?” Marcus asked.

  “I’m not worried about the aunt,” Louise sighed. “I’m worried about Joanna Hunter. There are some, I don’t know, anomalies.”

  “And so the two of us are driving a hundred and sixty miles to knock on a door,” Marcus puzzled. “Couldn’t the local police do that?”

  “Yes, they could,” she said patiently (so much more patiently than with Patrick). “But we’re doing it instead.”

  “And do you think it has anything to do with Decker possibly being up in the Edinburgh area? Or is it the dodgy husband? Like a buried-beneath-the-patio scenario?”

  “Or kidnap,” Louise said. There, she’d uttered the word she’d been avoiding.

  “Kidnap?”

  “Well, there is no evidence that Joanna Hunter is alive and well and free, is there?” Louise said.

  “ ‘Proof of life,’ that’s what they call it in kidnap cases, isn’t it?”

  “I think that might be what they call it in the movies. I don’t know, I really don’t. I’m probably just being stupid, okay. I just want to be sure. I would have said she’s not the kind of person who runs away and hides. But that’s exactly what she did once.”

  “Not criticizing, boss. Just asking.”

  Louise couldn’t remember when she had last admitted stupidity to anyone.

  Marcus got a call back about Reggie’s Nissan. “Registered to a company in Glasgow, some kind of chauffeur company, weddings and the like, although it’s hard to visualize the blushing bride climbing out of a Pathfinder.”

  “All roads lead to Glasgow,” Louise said.

  “Who was the guy who wasn’t Decker, boss? In the hospital?”

  “Nobody. He was nobody. Ordinary guy.”

  Discharged himself? How? Why?” When she had returned to the hospital and seen the bed stripped and the occupant missing, she had immediately thought that he must be lying in the morgue somewhere, but, “Discharged? Are you sure?”

  “Against medical advice,” a nurse at the ward station said disapprovingly.

  “His daughter was here,” the Irish nurse said. “He went with her.”

  “His daughter?” Louise couldn’t remember the name of Jackson’s daughter even though they had once in the past traded parental guidance notes, but she was what — eleven, twelve? Louise couldn’t remember. “On her own?” she asked.

  The nurse shrugged as if it was a matter of indifference to her.

  He had gone. Without even saying good-bye. The bastard.

  It took less time than you would think to arrive in the middle of nowhere. They made it in just under three hours. “So there,” she said to the Sat Nav.

  “Break out the biscuits,” Marcus said.

  Turn left at Scotch Corner and within minutes you were in a different world. A green kind of world. Not as green as water-sodden Ireland, where they had gone on honeymoon. Louise had fancied Ker
ala but somehow they had ended up in Donegal. “You can go to India on your next honeymoon,” Patrick said. How they laughed. Ha, ha, ha.

  He talked about “going back to Ireland someday.” He meant when he retired, and no matter how hard she tried, Louise couldn’t figure herself into this vision of the future.

  Hawes was a small market town with a big cheese thing going on that she didn’t understand until Marcus said, “Wensleydale, boss. You know” — he made a ridiculous rubber face, baring all his teeth in a grin and said, “Cheeese, Gromit, cheeese. Wallace and Gromit are, like, local heroes.”

  “Uh-huh,” Louise said. Don’t come between a boy and his cartoon heroes. Archie was fanatical about some American horror comic series. My two boys, Louise thought — light and dark, cherub and demon.

  It was the kind of place that had everything an elderly aunt might want, big enough to have shops and doctors and dentists, a nice house with a view, “Hillview Cottage,” in fact, which did indeed have a view of a hill but was more of a fifties-style bungalow than a quaint roses-round-the-door kind of dwelling. It was on the outskirts of Hawes, taking in town and country. “The best of both worlds,” she imagined Oliver Barker saying to his wife when they retired here. Louise wondered if she should be worried that the entire Mason clan, both real and unreal, had taken up residence in her brain.

  Louise was an urbanite, she preferred the gut-thrilling sound of an emergency siren slicing through the night to the noise of country birds at dawn. Pub brawls, rackety roadworks, mugged tourists, the badlands on a Saturday night — they all made sense, they were part of the huge, dirty, torn social fabric. There was a war raging out there in the city and she was part of the fight, but the countryside unsettled her because she didn’t know who the enemy was. She had always preferred North and South to Wuthering Heights. All that demented running around the moors, identifying yourself with the scenery, not a good role model for a woman.

  If she was forced at gunpoint to choose where she would prefer to bury herself — Ireland or Hawes — Louise supposed she would go for Hawes. The last time she had talked properly to Jackson, rather than watching him asleep in a hospital bed, he had owned a place in France. That sounded a lot better than either Yorkshire or Ireland to Louise but she suspected that it was the Jackson rather than the France part of the equation that was attractive, as, presumably, rural France had more than its fair share of twittering birds and mind-numbing tranquillity. She had never been to France, never been anywhere, really. Certainly never been to Kerala. Patrick had suggested next April in Paris, “a long weekend,” and she had shied away because secretly she was saving Paris for Jackson, which was clearly ridiculous. She was standing in his home county now, but the Dales were not the grim and grime that formed his essence. She should stop thinking about him. This kind of obsession was exactly how you ended up plucking feathers from pillows on your deathbed.