When Will There Be Good News? (Jackson Brodie, #3)

by Kate Atkinson

I died,” he said to a new doctor. “Briefly,” she said dismissively, as if you had to be dead a lot longer to impress her. Dr. Foster, a woman, who didn’t seem to want to be on first-name terms. “But technically . . . ,” he said, too weak to pursue the argument. She sighed as if patients were always bickering about their dead or alive status. “Yes. Technically dead,” she conceded. “Very briefly.”

Sadie whined impatiently. She had heard the word walk several sentences ago and still nothing had happened.

“Let’s get a ball for you, Sadie,” and Sadie gave a little woof of excitement at the word ball.

she whistled to Sadie, who came trotting up, tail whirling round, the way it did when she was excited at retrieving treasure. She was carrying something in her mouth, and when she reached Reggie, she placed her find at her feet and sat obediently, waiting to be praised. Reggie’s heart nearly stopped when she saw what Sadie had dropped on the ground. The baby’s comforter, his square of moss-green blanket.

Mum used to carry loads of heavy bags around with her—they’d never been able to afford a car—she used to say her genes had been spliced with those of a donkey. No, she didn’t say that, Mum wouldn’t have used the word spliced, she might not even have used genes. What had she said? She was fading, retreating into a darkness where Reggie couldn’t follow. “Bred from a donkey”—that was it.

Sadie had what Dr. Hunter called her “party pieces” as well, she could roll over, and play dead, and shake your hand—her big paw softer and heavier in your hand than you expected.

she appreciated the medicinal taste of a Laphroaig. She could drink most guys under the table if she had to (sometimes you had to),

She was disinclined to think that he had killed himself, he wasn’t the type, his sense of self-importance was too great. “Hitler killed himself,” Karen Warner said. “He was what you might call self-important.” She was standing in front of Louise’s desk, eating a prawn sandwich from Marks & Spencer that was making Louise feel nauseous. “Napoleon didn’t,” Louise said. “Stalin didn’t, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Genghis Khan, Alexander, Caesar. Let’s face it, Hitler was the exception to the rule.” “My, you’re in a mood,” Karen said. “No, I’m not.”

“What’s Dr. Hunter like?” she asked Reggie Chase on the drive to Musselburgh, and the girl said, “Well . . .” It seemed Joanna Hunter liked Chopin and Beth Nielsen Chapman and Emily Dickinson and Henry James and had a remarkable tolerance for the Tweenies. She could play the piano—“really well,” according to Reggie—and agreed with William Morris that you should have nothing in your house that you didn’t know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. She loved coffee in the morning and tea in the afternoon and had a surprisingly sweet tooth and said that it was a medical fact that you had a separate “pudding stomach,” which was why when you’d eaten a big meal you could always “find room for dessert.” She didn’t believe in God, her favorite book was Little Women because it was about “girls and women discovering their strengths,” and her favorite film was La Règle du Jeu, which she had lent Reggie a copy of and which Reggie liked a lot, although not as much as The Railway Children, which was her favorite film. If Dr. Hunter had to rescue three things from a burning building, they would be the baby and the dog but Reggie hadn’t been sure what the third thing would be—Louise suggested Mr. Hunter but Reggie said she thought he would probably manage to rescue himself. Of course, if Reggie was in the building, then Dr. Hunter would rescue her, Reggie said. And she loved the baby. Gabriel—of course, Gabriel, Gabrielle. The baby was named for Joanna Hunter’s dead mother.

“What time is it?” “Six o’clock,” Nurse Fuzzy said. (“My name’s actually Marian.”) “In the morning?” “No.” “In the evening?” “Yes.” He had to check, just in case there was another time of day where six o’clock could park.

He was woken by something brushing his cheek, a butterfly wing, or a kiss. More likely a kiss than a butterfly wing. “Hello, stranger,” a familiar voice said. “Fuzzy,” he mumbled. He opened his eyes and she was there. Of course. He had a moment of supernatural clarity. He was with the wrong woman. He had been going the wrong way. This was the right way. The right woman. “Hello, you,” he said. He had been mute for decades and now suddenly he’d been given a voice. “I was thinking about you,” Jackson said. “I just didn’t know it.” Her eyes were black pools of exhaustion. She was prettier than he remembered. She put a finger on his lips and said, “Shh. You had me at fuzzy.” She laughed. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen her laugh before. Everything suddenly shifted into place. “I love you,” he said.

She had flashed her warrant card and got onto the wards. Access all areas. They would have to tear that warrant card out of her hands when she left the police force. Then she had walked through wards full of train crash survivors until she found him.

he opened his eyes as if he’d been waiting for her. “Hello, stranger,” she said and he said, “I love you,” and she felt completely disorientated, as if she had been burled around in an eightsome reel and then let go and flung across the dance floor. She was trying to compose the right response to this declaration of his feelings when the Irish nurse swooped back in and said, “He won’t stop asking for his wife, you wouldn’t have any idea how to get hold of her, would you, Chief Inspector?” and the spell was broken.

Louise retrieved the remains of the ice cream from the freezer and dug into the tub. She didn’t even like ice cream, but at least it didn’t count as it was going into her pudding stomach (thank you, Dr. Hunter).

Of course, the right response was “I love you too,” and it was only by the merest whisker that she had escaped saying it to Jackson.

Joanna understood that everyone was alive except for the people she cared about the most. And it was winter. The bleak midwinter. “Why don’t you come downstairs and have some breakfast with me?” Martina said, smiling encouragingly at her. “Some oatmeal? Or some eggs? You like eggs, darling.” And so Joanna climbed obediently out of bed and allowed the rest of her life to begin.

Joanna was always “she” to her father, not said in a malicious way, he just seemed to find the naming of her difficult. She had been his least favorite of the three of them, and now she was the only one and she still wasn’t the favorite.

He’d recently bought an espresso machine, a big, shiny red monster that looked as if it should be powering a small factory during the industrial revolution.

When she was thirteen she announced she wanted to become a nun. Their mother, despite being a devout Irish Catholic, was terrified. She had been looking forward to a future where a married Niamh popped in and out of her house, trailing babies in her wake. To

She peeled off a ten-pound note from the tight wad that cheapskate Mr. Hunter gave her yesterday. She put it on his locker. “In case you need stuff,” she said, “you know, chocolate or news papers.” “I’ll pay you back,” he said. Reggie wondered how he intended to do that. He didn’t have any money, he was penniless. He had no wallet, no credit cards, no phone, nothing to his name at all. He only just had his own name. (“Yes, we had some trouble identifying your father,” Dr. Foster said.) No wonder the hospital had no record of him when she first phoned, they thought he was someone else altogether. Like Reggie, he’d been stripped of everything. At least now Reggie had a bagful of Topshop clothes. And a dog.

While she was in the hospital, Reggie left the dog lying placidly on the grass verge, near the taxi stand. She had written on a piece of paper “This dog is not a stray, her owner is visiting in the hospital” and stuck it inside Sadie’s collar in case someone decided to call the SSPCA. Everywhere you went there were “No Dogs Allowed” signs. What was a person supposed to do? It would be good if she could get hold of a guide-dog harness and put it on Sadie. Then she’d be able to take her anywhere. And, as a plus point, people would be sorry for the poor little blind girl and be especially nice to her. “Good dog,” Reggie said to Sadie when she left her, and the dog responded with a soft whine, which Reggie guessed meant “Don’t forget to come back.” Dog language was pretty easy to interpret compared with human language. (Something and nothing, this and that, here and there.)

Sadie spotted Reggie as soon as she came out of the hospital. She stood to attention, her ears pricked up, the way she did when she was on guard duty. Reggie felt a surge of something very like happiness. It felt good to have someone (if a dog was someone) who was pleased to see her. The dog wagged her tail. If Reggie had had a tail she would have wagged it too.

If she ever kissed Jackson, it would be the end of decency and good manners. A pair of tigers roaring in the night. Not yesterday in the hospital, that had been a chaste kiss for an invalid. If they ever kissed properly, they would exchange breath, they would exchange souls. Never think about one man in another man’s bed, especially if the man in the bed is your husband. Height of bad manners, Louise. Bad wife. Very bad wife.

He rubbed the stubble on his chin and stared at her absently for a moment. He didn’t look in good fettle.

He squashed himself against the doorpost and she had to squeeze past him. Just a little bit too close to Louise’s perimeter fence. He smelled of drink and cigarettes and looked as if he’d been up all night, which was not as unattractive as it should have been. You wouldn’t kick him out of your bed. If you weren’t married, that is, and he weren’t married, and there weren’t an outside chance that he’d somehow done away with his wife. Crazy talk, Louise.

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.

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.

“Do you think she’ll be up to having a chat?” she said. “I doubt it,” the girl said. “Because she’s not lucid?” “Because she’s dead.” Yeah, Louise thought. Death did have a way of shutting you up.

The only vehicle that the car-rental agency in Edinburgh had been able to provide Jackson with that he could drive one-handed—an automatic with the hand brake on the steering wheel—was a huge Renault Espace that you could have lived in if necessary. Espace—space. Plenty of that.

Reggie was making a meal of navigating. She had the disturbing habit, shared with his daughter, his real daughter, of gleefully verbalizing (and occasionally singing) every road sign—“hidden dip, sharp bend, Berwick-on-Tweed twenty-four miles, roadworks for half a mile.”

Reggie was more than a match for a bunch of squaddies. It was like watching a Jack Russell fending off a pack of Dobermans.

When they set off she claimed the driving seat before Marcus had a chance to offer to drive. Everyone in this car, as far as Louise was concerned, needed to know who was in charge.

“Well, I do have a home to go to, actually,” Jackson pointed out. “It’s just that the world and his wife seems intent on stopping me reaching it.”

They let Billy go. Gave him a second chance. Not really a second, more like a hundredth. “Blood is blood,” Reggie said. “After all.” Considering he used to be a policeman, Jackson didn’t seem to care one way or the other. Anyone could see, he said, “anyone except his sister, perhaps,” that “Billy boy” was hurtling at breakneck speed towards a bad end without any intervention from anyone. No, she assured him, his sister could see that too.

The dog in the backseat gave a soft whine. “She’s happy to be back in Dr. Hunter’s car and at the same time sad that Dr. Hunter isn’t in it.” “You speak Dog, do you?” “Yes.”

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.

and, last but not least, my cousin Timothy Edwards for the title.

Apologies—artistic license and so on. I have never seen a horse in Midmar field, but that doesn’t mean that there will never be one.