When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

  She was going to leave Patrick at Hogmanay, then they could start the new year with a clean slate. New broom, fresh start. Roll out the clichés, Louise. Not at Christmas, it would be a cruel thing to do to him, his last wife had left, albeit involuntarily, at Christmas. Every future Christmas would be marred by the memory of another wife abandoning him. He’d get a new one. He was good at marriage (“Lots of practice,” she could imagine him laughing to the next one.). He was a good man, shame she was such a bad woman.

  Love is the important thing. That was Joanna Hunter’s parting message to her on the third and last time she interviewed her. Tried to interview her. The woman was as intransigent as marble. “You were just wandering around for three nights? You claim you don’t remember anything? Not where you slept or how you ate? You had no car, no money. I don’t understand, Dr. Hunter.”

  “Neither do I, Chief Inspector. Call me Jo.”

  Louise supposed she could have pushed it, found some forensic evidence somewhere. The clothes she left the house in, for example — the black suit, where was it? Or the Prius, parked in the street and freshly valeted of all trace evidence. To every question, Joanna Hunter just shrugged and said she couldn’t remember. You couldn’t break her. Not Neil Hunter either. He’d recanted his whole story about Anderson and extortion.

  Maybe you could have broken her if you had really wanted to. Maybe if you had pushed her on the two bodies found in a burned-out house in Penicuik, guys whose identities were still in question almost two weeks later. They’d finally got one of them, the marine, through his dental records, left the service ten years ago and no one really knew what he’d been doing since. The other guy remained a mystery. No sign of the knife that had finished off the guy with the crushed windpipe, no sign of whatever had been rammed through the other guy’s eye into his brain. The fire destroyed any fingerprint evidence. “Looks professional,” the lead DI on the case said when they talked about it at a Task and Coordinating Group meeting.

  There was no mention of a possibility that it might be linked to Joanna Hunter in any way. She disappeared, she reappeared. End of story. Anderson came up smelling like roses, Mr. Hunter, on the other hand, was being prosecuted for willful fire-raising for the purposes of a false insurance claim.

  Marcus’s death was big news for several days. “Hero Policeman” and so on. His mother turned off his life support after a week, so his funeral was just before Christmas. “Makes no difference to me,” she said. “There’ll be no more Christmas now.” The day after the funeral she jumped off the North Bridge at three in the morning. Give her a medal too.

  And as for Decker, Louise couldn’t get her head round that at all.

  “You visited him in prison,” she said to Joanna Hunter. “Why? What did you say to him?”

  “Oh, nothing much,” she said. “This and that, you know how it is.”

  “No, I don’t,” Louise said.

  Joanna Hunter was decorating her Christmas tree, hanging cheap glass baubles as if they were precious jewels. “He was very remorseful for what he’d done. He’d become religious in prison,” she said, contemplating the white, top-of-the-tree angel that she was holding in her hand.

  “He converted to Catholicism,” Louise said. “And then killed himself. He must have known that means eternal damnation to a Catholic.”

  “Well, perhaps he thought that would be the right punishment for him,” Joanna Hunter said, climbing on a stepladder to reach the top of the tree.

  “You know how to shoot a gun,” Louise said, holding the stepladder steady.

  “I do. But I didn’t pull the trigger.” And Louise thought, No, but somehow or other you persuaded him to do it.

  “I went to see him because I wanted him to understand what he had done,” Joanna Hunter said as she reached to fix the angel on the top of the tree. “To know that he had robbed people of their lives for no reason. Maybe seeing me, grown up, and with the baby, brought it home to him, made him think how Jessica and Joseph would have been.” Good explanation, Louise thought. Very rational. Worthy of a doctor. But who was to say what else she had murmured to him across the visitors’ table.

  She had taken the baby. The good and the evil in her life in the same room, and the evil had been vanquished. If she was ever in a perilous situation, if she was at the end of a dark street on a dark night with nowhere to run, Louise would opt for Joanna Hunter to be fighting on her side. She’d certainly rather fight with her than against her.

  And had it satisfied her when Decker blew his brains out? It hadn’t satisfied Louise when David Needler shot himself. It was the easy way out — Shipman, West, Thomas Hamilton, still in control even of their own deaths. She would rather have seen Needler in front of a firing squad, facing the moment when he knew that he too had been vanquished.

  Joanna Hunter climbed back down the stepladder and switched on the Christmas tree lights. “There,” she said. “Doesn’t that look lovely, Chief Inspector?”

  “Call me Louise.”

  Cheers,” Louise said, raising her glass of orange juice, and Alison said, “Cheers.”

  I got a puppy for Christmas,” she told the Needler children. “When he’s a bit bigger I’ll bring him round to see you.”

  “What are you going to call him?” Cameron asked.

  “Jackson,” Louise said.

  “That’s a funny name for a dog,” Simone said.

  “Yeah,” Louise said. “I know.”

  The Rising of the Sun, the Running of the Deer

  Merry Christmas,” Dr. Hunter said, raising her mug. They toasted Christmas morning with coffee and mince pies and brandy butter for breakfast. (“Oh, for heaven’s sake, why not?” Dr. Hunter said.) The baby had porridge and a boiled egg. Then they opened presents around the tree. The baby had a push-along dog that looked a bit like a Labrador, although he was more interested in the wrapping paper. Sadie, a real dog, was given a handsome collar and a new ball that bounced as high as the ceiling. Dr. Hunter made Reggie cry because she gave her a PowerBook, brand-new, that no one was going to take away, when all Reggie had given Dr. Hunter was a velvet scarf. It was a nice one, though, from Jenners, that she’d scraped her remaining money together to buy.

  Jackson Brodie had insisted on giving her a check for a lot more than the amount he had borrowed from her, even though she said, “No, no, you don’t have to do that,” but when she went to the bank to try and pay it into her account, the bank said they would “have to refer it,” which Mr. Hussain said meant that it had bounced and that Jackson Brodie had no money, despite what he had said about being rich. Which just went to show that you thought you knew a person and they turned out to be someone else. He still belonged to her, but she wasn’t sure she wanted him anymore.

  Reggie was staying here now, “Until you find somewhere else,” Dr. Hunter said, “but of course you might prefer to stay here for good. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

  They didn’t really talk about what had happened. Some things were best left alone. They never talked, for example, about whose blood it was that Dr. Hunter and the baby were covered in. Jackson wouldn’t let Reggie go inside the house (“Don’t you dare!”), so she didn’t know exactly who was inside or what had happened to them. Something bad, obviously. Something irreversible.

  Of course, Reggie read in the Evening News later about how two unidentified men had been found in a burned-out house and how it was all a mystery, and it struck her that a person who was going to do anything to protect their baby might be someone the police would want to consider for the murders, but they didn’t. And no matter how many times Dr. Hunter was questioned by the police about what had happened to her, she always told them that she had gone out for a walk and suffered some kind of amnesia, which was crazy, but they didn’t have much choice other than to believe her.

  “What do you think happened, Reggie?” Chief Inspector Monroe asked her, and Reggie said, “I honestly don’t know,” which was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth.

  Dr. Hunter wore the scarf all Christmas Day, she said it was the prettiest scarf she had ever had. They drank champagne and ate roast goose and Christmas pudding, and the baby had pink ice cream and fell asleep on Reggie’s knee while they watched The Muppet Christmas Carol and, all in all, it was the best Christmas Reggie had ever had, and if Mum had been there it would have been perfect.

  Ms. MacDonald was buried just before Christmas. Sergeant Wiseman and the Asian policeman came to the funeral, which Reggie thought was beyond the call of duty. She had a regular Christian kind of service because her weird religion didn’t really run to funerals. Most of the members (five out of the eight) of her church stood up and said something about rapture and tribulation and so on, and Reggie stood up and said, “Ms. MacDonald was always good to me,” and some other stuff that was a bit more complimentary than Ms. MacDonald really deserved, because a person shouldn’t speak ill of the dead unless he was Hitler or the man who killed Dr. Hunter’s family. No one mentioned that Ms. MacDonald had caused the Musselburgh train crash. Death absolved a lot of things, it seemed.

  Reggie had organized the funeral with the Co-op because they’d done Mum’s funeral as well. She chose the same hymn, too, “Abide with Me.” She went to see Ms. MacDonald lying in her coffin. It was lined with white polyester satin, so she kept her preference for synthetics right to the end. The Co-op undertaker said, “Shall I leave you alone?” and Reggie nodded sadly and said, “Yes,” and then when he left the room she tucked all the little plastic bags of heroin that she’d found in the Loebs’ secret hearts into the coffin with Ms. MacDonald. Ms. MacDonald was one person that you could guarantee wasn’t going to come to harm from drugs. After she took them out of the Loebs, she had kept them on the shelf in Dr. Hunter’s garage behind the paint tins, because, as Dr. Hunter said, no one ever looked there.

  It hadn’t been all the Loebs, but quite a few. She had weighed the plastic bags on Ms. MacDonald’s ancient scales and they came to almost a kilo, which represented a lot of money. She supposed Billy must have been taking something off the top from what he was dealing and hiding it, but she didn’t ask him because she hadn’t seen him, and now all the little plastic bags had gone up in flames along with Ms. MacDonald, and Ginger and Blondie were never going to get their drugs back. They had known that Billy was keeping the drugs in the Loebs, but they had never suspected there was a whole library of them in Ms. MacDonald’s front room.

  Ms. MacDonald left a will in which she said her house had to be sold and the proceeds shared between the church and Reggie, so now Reggie had her college fund, just like that.

  What’s your brother doing for Christmas?” Dr. Hunter asked.

  “I don’t know. Spending it with his friends.” One truth, one lie, you couldn’t spend time with your friends if you didn’t have any friends. She had no idea where he was. He would turn up again, the bad penny, the rotten apple.

  The thing was. How did Dr. Hunter know about Billy? Reggie knew for a fact that she had never mentioned her brother to her. One more puzzling thing to add to the pile of puzzling things that surrounded Dr. Hunter, enough to fill the junk repository to overflowing.

  Mr. Hunter wasn’t there on Christmas Day. Dr. Hunter said he could come on Boxing Day and say Happy Christmas to the baby. He had been charged with burning down one of his arcades and was on bail, staying in a ropy-looking B and B in Polwarth while Dr. Hunter “made up her mind” about whether she wanted him back in her life, but you could tell that she’d already made it up. It looked like he was going to be declared bankrupt, so it was lucky that the house was in Dr. Hunter’s name.

  “He did try, I suppose,” Reggie said, surprised to hear herself standing up for Mr. Hunter, who’d never done her any favors, after all, but Dr. Hunter said, “But not hard enough.” She said that if Mr. Hunter had been in her place, she would have done anything to get him back, “And I mean anything,” she said with such a fierce look on her face that Reggie knew that Dr. Hunter would walk to the ends of the earth for someone she loved and that she, Little Reggie Chase, orphan of the parish, savior of Jackson Brodie, help of Dr. Hunter, daughter of Jackie, came within that warm circle. And now, for better or worse, the world was all before her. Vivat Regina!

  God Bless Us, Every One

  Billy sloped past all the lit-up windows in the street. A huge inflatable plastic Santa was hanging off a balcony on the neighboring block of flats, pretending to climb up. The Inch was crap at Christmas. Edinburgh was crap at Christmas. Scotland, the Earth, the universe. All crap on Christmas Day. He’d got fags from the Paki shop, at least they were open. He was going to kill his sister, he nearly had killed his sister.

  He might have to move town, to somewhere where no one knew him. Start again. Dundee, maybe. “You’re such an enterprising boy,” the old holy cow used to say to him when he came and fixed her lights or unblocked her drains or whatever. Take a book from the shelf, put his stash in it, put it back. Reggie was banned from those books and the old holy cow couldn’t see to read anymore so he thought it was safe.

  At least he had the money that Reggie’s precious doctor gave him for the Makarov. He couldn’t imagine what she wanted it for. Funny old world.

  An old drunk staggered past him and said, “Merry Christmas, son,” and Billy said, “Away to fuck, you old cunt,” and they both laughed.

  Safely Gathered In

  Westminster Bridge, at dawn. There was a poem and he was relieved to find that he couldn’t remember any of it. It was freezing cold. The city was almost deserted in a way that you never saw it normally. This wasn’t how he had expected to spend Christmas Day. On his own, on his uppers, in the Great Wen. They had planned to book something last minute to somewhere hot and relatively un-Christmassy. “I don’t like Christmas too much,” Tessa said to him. “Do you?”

  “Hadn’t really given it too much thought,” Jackson said.

  “North Africa,” she had suggested, running her finger down his spine so that he quivered like a cat. “A flight into Egypt. I can probably educate you. Antiquities and so forth.”

  “You probably can,” he said. “Antiquities and so forth.”

  A pair of young guys, still drunk from the excesses of Christmas Eve, passed by and gave him a peculiar look, perhaps because he was contemplating the Thames with an intensity that suggested he was thinking of joining himself with the icy waters. He wasn’t. His brother had done that to him, he wouldn’t do it to his daughter. The two young guys probably thought he was some poor schmuck with no home to go to, no family bosom to be warmly welcomed into at the festive season. They were right.

  He held it in his hand. “I found it in the pocket of your jacket,” she said. The plastic bag with Nathan’s hair. Reggie had returned a postcard to him as well, the one Marlee had sent to him from Bruges. Missing you! Love you! The postcard looked as if it had been through a war.

  It was funny because he was actually missing Reggie more than he was missing Marlee. Marlee had plenty of people who cared about her, but they were thin on the ground for Reggie. “We’re all on our own, Mr. B., that’s why we have to care for each other.” The Christmas spirit had got to her, he supposed. He hadn’t saved her life (“Not yet,” she said), hadn’t repaid the debt that had been written in his blood.

  He wondered, too, about the strolling woman. Was she waking up in a bed in a house to the sound of carols on the radio and the smell of a turkey in the oven, or was she still walking the empty roads on the high tops in the snow and the wind and the rain.

  Everywhere you looked, there was unfinished business and unanswered questions. He had always imagined that when you died, there was a last moment when everything was cleared up for you — the business finished, the questions answered, the lost things found — and you thought, “Oh, right, I understand,” and then you were free to go into the darkness, or the light. But it had never happened when he died (“Briefly,” he heard Dr. Foster say), so perhaps it never would. Everything w
ould remain a mystery. Which meant, if you thought about it, that you should try and clear everything up as much as you could while you were still alive. Find the answers, solve the mysteries, be a good detective. Be a crusader.

  He had planned, originally, to take Nathan’s hair for DNA analysis. Nathan who would be waking up this morning to spend Christmas in the country with Julia and Mr. Arty-Farty. Jackson fingered the filthy plastic bag. He supposed the noble thing to do would be to cast it into the river, to let it go, to let Nathan go. But he wasn’t feeling very noble on this cold, gray English Christmas Day. He’d lost everything. His new wife, his old wife, his money, his home. He put the bag back in his pocket.

  Tessa didn’t get everything. The sale of his French house was delayed and the money came into his account just before Christmas. It wasn’t the kind of sum you turned your nose up at, so “yet again you fall on your feet,” Josie said.

  Time to move on, begin again. It felt late to be making a fresh start. Jackson wondered if he was just too old a dog to learn new tricks.

  He was feeling about as bad as a man can feel when he thought about finding Joanna, which was a warm sunbeam kind of thought that could cheer a man even on the darkest of days.

  Not the second, bloody, time, but the first time, on that balmy night in the Devon countryside. He remembered moving his torch in a wide arc across the wheat and spotting her just in time before he stumbled over her small, still body. He thought she was dead. Within the course of one year of his life when he was twelve, he had watched his mother die in hospital, he had seen his sister’s body dredged unceremoniously out of a canal, he had found his brother hanging. He was only nineteen and he knew that he couldn’t bear it if the girl was dead, that it would snap what was left of his heart from its moorings and he would cease to be Lance Corporal Brodie of the Prince of Wales’s Own Regiment of Yorkshire and become himself a small child alone forever in the dark.