When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

  They had walked into the bedroom as she was getting changed. She had heard Sadie barking dementedly downstairs and a banging noise that she didn’t understand until she realized the dog was trying to break down a door to get to her. She had gathered up the baby and rushed out onto the upstairs landing, and that was when she saw them.

  The rope was too short to reach the window, but she could stand on the bed and from there she could see out. Fields, nothing but brown fields, winter barren, lit by a bright, cold moon. No sign of another house.

  On the second day, Peter gave her a pad of paper and a pen and told her to write a note to “your husband.” What should she say? That they would die if he didn’t do as he was told, Peter said. She wondered what Neil had done to bring this about and what he was doing to end it.

  She became a doctor because she wanted to help people. It was a terrible cliché but it was true (but not true of all doctors). She wanted to help all the people who were sick and in pain, from measles to cancer, from heartsickness to depression. If she couldn’t heal herself, then she could at least heal someone else. That was why she had been attracted to Neil — he hadn’t needed healing, he was whole in himself, he didn’t suffer the pain and sadness of the world, he just got on with his life. She was a bowl, holding everything inside, he was Mars throwing his spear into the world. She didn’t have to tend to him, didn’t have to worry about him. Necessarily, that meant there were drawbacks to living with him, but who was perfect? Only the baby.

  She had spent the thirty years since the murders creating a life. It wasn’t a real life, it was the simulacrum of one, but it worked. Her real life had been left behind in that other, golden field. And then she had the baby and her love for him breathed life into the simulacrum and it became genuine. Her love for the baby was immense, bigger than the entire universe. Fierce.

  The guy we’re working for,” Peter said, “wants your husband to sign over his business. You’re the price. He’s got all the papers ready for him to sign, nice and legal.”

  She thought that was absurd and said, “But that’s coercion, it would never stand up in court,” and he laughed and said, “You’re not in your world now, Doctor.” She’d hoped that this was the beginning of more conversation between them, but he lost interest and nodded at the pen and paper and said, “So make it good.” She wondered if Neil had known what the people he was dealing with were like and decided he probably had.

  “And if he doesn’t?” she said. “If he doesn’t sign everything over to your boss, what happens to us?” But he just stared at her as if she weren’t there.

  So she wrote, “They are going to kill us if you don’t do as they say.”

  Sometime in the early hours on Saturday, John woke her up and gave her the paper and pen again and told her to write something — “Anything. Time’s running out for you” — and then he left the room. She wrote with the Biro, “Please help us. We don’t want to die.” Despite what they said about doctors, she’d always had a neat hand. She crossed the t’s and dotted the i and underlined the Please, and when John came back for the note, she jammed the pen into his eyeball as hard as she could. It surprised her how far it went in.

  She took his pulse. Nothing. The baby slept on. She started to panic, it wouldn’t be long before Peter came back. She had to be ready. She searched all over John’s body for a weapon, but there was nothing. Peter had a knife in an ankle sheath, she’d seen it when he bent down to put food on the floor.

  The door opened and Peter said, “What the fuck?” when he saw her sitting on the floor, cradling John in her lap like a pietà. She couldn’t get the pen out of his eye in time so she had turned his head towards her and half-covered the pen with her hands. “Something’s happened to him,” she said, looking at Peter, “I don’t know what, I thought maybe he’d just fainted, but I’m not sure . . .” She tried to sound professional, like a doctor.

  Peter squatted on his haunches and turned John’s head towards him, and as he did so, she rose up, rolling John off her lap and onto the floor, and then slammed the heel of her hand upwards into Peter’s windpipe as hard as she could. He fell over backwards, holding his throat, his eyes bulging, and she leapt forward and grabbed the knife from his ankle and sawed through the rope around her own.

  She crouched down by his side and watched him. He was having a lot of trouble breathing but he wasn’t finished. She could feel her own breathing compromised, the airways constricting and whistling. She was drenched in sweat even though it was so cold in the room.

  She didn’t let him see the knife, but nonetheless he was squirming and wriggling, trying to get away from her. “Shh,” she said, laying a hand on his arm and then quietly, so he couldn’t see it coming, she stuck the knife into his common carotid artery, the left one. And then for good measure she stuck it in his right one as well, and the blood gushed as if she’d struck oil.

  The baby woke up and laughed when he saw her and she said, “Little Tommy Tittlemouse lived in a little house, he caught fishes in other men’s ditches.”

  A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

  The Prius was no longer in the garage. Lights spilled out from the back of the house. It was six o’clock in the morning on a Saturday, perhaps Neil Hunter was up early, but it seemed more likely he hadn’t been to bed. Through the glass of the French windows, she could see him slumped on the living-room sofa, his eyes closed. Louise tapped on the glass, the ghost of Miss Jessel, and Neil Hunter jerked awake, a look of terror on his face, which subsided when he recognized her. He got to his feet unsteadily and unlocked the door. “Don’t tell me — you again,” he said. He looked completely burned-out.

  “Do you want to tell us who your friends are?” she said, walking into the room, and he laughed grimly and said, “Friends? What friends? It turns out that I don’t have any friends.” The guy looked dead on his feet.

  “And your wife? What’s happened to her, Mr. Hunter? I think we’ve been messed around enough, don’t you? She never rented a car to go down to Yorkshire, there was no phone call from the aunt, in fact — and this is a bit of a clincher — her aunt died two weeks ago. So what’s going on exactly?”

  Neil Hunter sank into a chair and put his head in his hands. Louise squatted down beside him and said gently, “Just tell me, has she been kidnapped, yes or no?” He drew breath noisily and said nothing.

  Louise stood up and in her best official voice said, “Neil Hunter, I am going to ask you some questions. You are not obliged to say anything in response to the questions, but if you do say anything, it will be taken down in writing and may be used in evidence.”

  He burst into tears.

  Louise stood on the Hunters’ front doorstep, breathing in the chilly early-morning air. It was at times like this she wished she smoked, because then she wouldn’t be so badly tempted to raid Neil Hunter’s Laphroaig.

  It was the middle of the morning and the street was alive with police. Horses, bolts, and stable doors came to mind.

  Neil Hunter had been taken in for questioning but he wasn’t making much sense, and the Strathclyde police had knocked up Anderson from his luxury penthouse but he was all lawyered-up. No one had any idea where to start looking for Joanna Hunter. They’d picked up the Nissan on the M8 with the registration that Reggie had given them, but the guys in it weren’t talking either.

  Joanna Hunter was dead, Louise was sure. The baby too. Lying in a ditch somewhere or being fed to pigs. Hunter said she was gone when he got home on Wednesday evening and that an hour later he’d received a phone call telling him that if he went to the police he’d never see her again. “Find the money to pay Anderson or sign over everything,” he said to Louise before they took him down to the station.

  “And that was Wednesday?” Louise said. “And today’s Saturday and you didn’t simply sign everything over straightaway?”

  “I was trying to find the money.”

  “You didn’t sign everything over straightaway?”

  “Don’t
make out I don’t care about my family.”

  “You. Didn’t. Sign. Everything. Over. Straight. Away.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I do understand — you didn’t sign everything over straightaway. The documentation would have been laughed out of court. You would have still kept everything and you would have had a chance of getting your wife and baby back.”

  “And he would have come after me some other way. Anderson’s a maniac, his henchmen are maniacs. Once he gets his teeth into something, he doesn’t let go. If I took him to court, he’d come after us, kill us for sure.”

  A uniform came out of the house and said, “Boss?” He had important news written all over his face and she thought, that’s it, Joanna Hunter’s dead, but then the uniform broke into a big grin.

  “You’re not going to believe it, boss. She’s back. She’s in the house.”

  “Who? Dr. Hunter?”

  “Dr. Hunter, and the baby. And a girl.”

  “A girl?”

  What kind of a magic trick was that? Joanna Hunter was sitting on the sofa in the once-lovely living room. She was wearing clean jeans and a soft pale blue sweater that looked like cashmere. It had little pearl buttons on the cuffs. It was the details that seemed so at odds with everything. She looked scrubbed clean. Her hair was damp, as though she’d just had a shower. “The baby’s asleep in his cot,” she said before Louise asked.

  Reggie was sitting on the sofa next to her with a bright, bland expression on her face as if she was determined to say absolutely nothing about anything. Joanna Hunter, on the other hand, was completely relaxed. “Sorry if I’ve given you any trouble,” she said as if she were apologizing for being late for a dental appointment.

  “I went away for a couple of days. It’s all a bit of a blank, I’m afraid. I think I had some kind of temporary amnesia. Disassociative fugue state is the medical term, I seem to remember. Trauma brought on by the memory of a previous trauma. Andrew Decker, I suppose. And so on.”

  “And so on?” Louise echoed.

  She was trying to think of a way into an interview with two consummate liars — she wasn’t sure how to find the truth, let alone follow it — but she was saved from the problem for now by a knock at the door. Karen Warner lumbered into the room.

  “Sorry to interrupt, boss.” She was breathing heavily, as if she’d been running. She didn’t even give the miraculous reappearance of Joanna Hunter a second look. She had the kind of grim expression on her face that could only mean something bad had happened.

  “Oh God,” Louise said, holding on to her heart. “It’s Needler, isn’t it? He’s back,” and Karen said, “Yes. He is.”

  “Someone’s dead,” Louise said. “I can tell from the look on your face. Who? Alison? One of the kids? All of them?”

  “None of them, boss. It’s Marcus.”

  Touch and go. It was a funny phrase if you thought about it. Marcus was in the operating theater. Louise and Karen were sitting in the deserted “sanctuary” in the RIE. There was some kind of non-denominational greenery to indicate Christmas.

  “What happened?” Louise asked.

  “I don’t know, there seems to be a lot of confusion. He heard the call and responded, I think he was on the ring road coming into work. Local uniforms were there already, I think it was all a bit casual, you know, the woman who cried wolf too many times.”

  “Casual. Jesus.”

  Needler had kept his family at gunpoint all night. One of the kids had managed to get hold of the panic button, and the local police had responded, the “first officer on the scene” had rung the doorbell, and Needler had opened the door and shot him in the chest. That “first officer” was Marcus. “He wasn’t wearing a vest,” Karen said. “He should have waited for the IRV. Idiot.”

  “Fools rush in,” Louise said. “He was trying to help.”

  By the time Karen and Louise arrived, it was all over bar the weeping.

  Needler had walked out of the house, giving an IRV officer a clear shot, but before they could take it he had turned his gun on himself.

  “The bastard,” Louise said. She had wanted to be in there at the kill, she wanted to have torn him apart with her bare hands, like a crazed maenad.

  Marcus had been taken to St. John’s Hospital in Livingston and then transferred to the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, where he had been operated on.

  When the surgeon came out of the operating theater, he recognized Louise and raised his eyebrow a fraction, a minimal gesture missed by Marcus’s mother but caught by Louise.

  “Oh God,” she moaned.

  “Don’t think He’s going to help,” Karen said.

  Louise stood at the foot of the bed. Marcus’s mother was sitting by the side of the bed, clutching her son’s hand. He was on life support in the intensive care unit.

  “He’s an only child,” his mother said. Her name was Judith, but it was impossible to think of her as anything other than “Marcus’s mother.”

  “His father’s dead,” she said. “I’ve always worried that something would happen to me and he would be left alone.” A motherless child. Now she was going to be a childless mother. Louise was losing him too, her sweet boy.

  A girl appeared, led to the bed by a nurse, and sat across from his mother. “This is Ellie,” Marcus’s mother said to Louise. Ellie didn’t acknowledge either of them; if she could have brought Marcus back with the power of her thoughts, then he would be up walking about. His mother reached across his body and took the girl’s hand. With her free hand she stroked her son’s close-shaven curls. “He’s such a good boy,” she said. “He looks as if he’s sleeping.”

  Louise said, “Yes, he does.” He didn’t. He didn’t look as if he were asleep, nobody looked like that when they were asleep, but hey.

  He had already left, he was just waiting for them to say good-bye. To infinity and beyond.

  Sweet Little Wife, Pretty Little Baby

  Lassie came home. She didn’t need anyone’s help in the end. She got back all on her own.

  It wasn’t light yet, so it was difficult to make out who it was. Just a shape, a shape moving closer. But the dog knew who it was.

  Reggie nearly fainted. She felt sick with the rush of chemicals in her body. A great cascade of adrenaline flowing through her, making her heart feel like a tight, hard knot in her chest. So many emotions flooded Reggie that she could hardly untangle them into their different threads. Relief and disbelief. Happiness. And horror. Lots of horror.

  Dr. Hunter was walking towards them, the baby in her arms. She was barefoot and she was still wearing her suit and the baby was still in his little matelot outfit. She was covered in blood. It matted her hair, it stained the skin on her face, her legs. The baby had streaks and splashes of red on him too.

  Not their blood. The baby was laughing at the sight of Sadie, and Dr. Hunter was walking straight and strong, like a heroine, a warrior queen.

  The dog cantered ahead and was the first to greet Dr. Hunter, as playful as a puppy. When the baby was almost close enough, he held out his fat little arms towards Reggie and did his starfish jump. She caught him and held him tight and said, “Hello, sunshine. I missed you.”

  Jackson went in the house and came back out, looking sick, then siphoned petrol out of the Toyota that was parked outside and used it to set fire to the house.

  You would think it was exactly the kind of situation in which a person would call the police — kidnap, murder, self-defense, et cetera — but no, apparently not. “I don’t want this in the baby’s life forever,” Dr. Hunter said to Jackson, “do you understand? The way I’ve had it in mine?” and Reggie supposed he must have done because he got rid of a whole crime scene — poof! — just like that.

  Then they left, walked back down the track to the car, the flames rising behind them into the dark morning sky. They must have looked as if they were walking out of hell.

  Dr. Hunter said, “Just let us out here,” as if he’d given them
a lift back from a supermarket, and Jackson dropped them in the small car park at the side of a field. “I can see my house from here,” Dr. Hunter said. “We’ll be fine. Thank you.” The baby reached out his fat little hand and Jackson shook it and said, “How d’you do,” and the baby laughed.

  “Good-bye, Mr. B.,” Reggie said and kissed him on the cheek, as lightly as a sparrow.

  There had been a lot of policemen at the house, but they had walked in from the field, through the gap in the hedge in the back garden, and into the kitchen, and the only sign of life was fingerprint dust all over the kitchen surfaces, so Dr. Hunter and Reggie went straight up the back stairs and into the bathroom as if they were invisible or charmed. Dr. Hunter ran a bath and gave the baby to Reggie and said, “Will you give him a bath, Reggie, while I take a shower?” and when they were both clean and warm and wrapped in towels, Dr. Hunter said, “It’s surprising just how much you miss soap and hot water.” And then she said to Reggie, as if it were a normal thing, “Do you think you could take our clothes and put them in your bag and dispose of them somewhere?” And Reggie, who was pretty good at dealing with bloodstained clothes by now, stuffed the baby’s matelot outfit and Dr. Hunter’s suit, T-shirt, and pretty underwear — all ruined by the blood — into her backpack. The blood wasn’t quite dry, which was a thought she didn’t dwell on.