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

by Kate Atkinson

“You smell of soot,” their father said to their mother. “And cabbage and milk.” “And you smell of failure,” their mother said.

Everything Joanna had was handed down from Jessica. It was as if without Jessica there would be no Joanna. Joanna filled the spaces Jessica left behind as she moved on.

Then Joanna realized that her mother wasn’t screaming at the man, she was screaming at her.

Their mother was cut down where she stood, the great silver knife carving through her heart as if it were slicing butcher’s meat. She was thirty-six years old.

He must have stabbed Jessica too before she ran off, because there was a trail of blood, a path that led them to her, although not at first, because the field of wheat had closed around her like a golden blanket. She w...

blood had mingled and soaked into the dry earth, feeding the grain, like a sa...

Joseph died where he was, strapped into ...

And Joanna. Joanna obeyed her mother when she screamed at her. “Run, Joanna, run,” she said, and Joanna ran into the...

It would have been better to have died with Jessica and her mother rather than being left behind without them. But she never thought about any of that, she just did as she was told. “Run, Joanna, run,” her mother commanded. So she did.

It was funny, but now, thirty years later, the thing that drove her to distraction was that she couldn’t remember what the dog was called. And there was no one left to ask.

every so often he would suddenly fling out his arms and legs and try to launch himself into the air like a suicidal starfish. “Uncontrollable joy,” Dr. Hunter had explained to Reggie. Dr. Hunter laughed. “Food makes him very happy.”

Reggie thought that there was nothing nicer than having a baby fall asleep on you, except perhaps a puppy or a kitten. She’d had a puppy once, but her brother threw it out the window.

(Dr. Hunter always said that simple pleasures were the best, and she was right.)

Mum had been kind to everybody, it was her saving grace, even when she was being stupid—with

However, Ms. MacDonald had her saving graces too—she was good to Reggie and she loved her little dog, and those two things went a long way in Reggie’s book.

Reggie didn’t like the idea that you could be walking along as blithe as could be and the next moment you simply didn’t exist.

Dr. Hunter liked to talk to him, and she had long one-sided conversations while, at his end, the baby tried to eat the phone.

Although the dog couldn’t speak, it seemed to understand the concept of phone conversations (“Hello, puppy, how’s my gorgeous girl?”) better than the baby did, and it listened alertly to Dr. Hunter’s voice while Reggie held the receiver to its ear.

“No matter how much I get rid of, there’s never any less,” she sighed. “Law of physics,” Reggie said.

“Morris says that you should have nothing in your house that you don’t know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful,”

‘Knowing that when light is gone, Love remains for shining,’ ” Dr. Hunter said. “Isn’t that lovely? Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote it for her dog.”

When they went shopping for her engagement ring in Alistir Tait’s in Rose Street, Patrick said to the jeweler, “This beautiful woman needs a big diamond.”

Why make it easy when you could make it as difficult for yourself as possible? She was a woman, so, technically speaking, she could do anything.

Really, every time a person said good-bye to another person, they should pay attention, just in case it was the last time. First things were good, last things not so much so.

Love wasn’t sweet and light, it was visceral and overpowering. Love wasn’t patient, love wasn’t kind. Love was ferocious, love knew how to play dirty.

He had thought at one point that he might feature in her future, and the next thing he knew he had been drop-kicked into her past.

He hadn’t caught the train to King’s Cross, he had caught the train from King’s Cross. The strolling woman had been right.

When Ms. MacDonald returned, all prayered-up and full of the spirit, she checked Reggie’s homework over tea and biscuits—“a plain digestive” for Ms. MacDonald and a Tunnock’s Caramel Wafer bought specially for Reggie.

“Yes, I’m afraid you’re going to hell, Reggie,” Ms. MacDonald said, smiling benignly at her. Still, there was one consolation: Ms. MacDonald wouldn’t be there, nagging her about her Virgil translation.

Mum had a Charles-and-Diana wedding mug that had survived longer than the marriage itself.

She wondered if eventually she would forget everything she’d learned. That was death, she supposed.

Cathy come home to Wuthering Heights. Mum’s ghost looking for Reggie. Back soon. Je reviens. Or just nobody and nothing. Fast falls the eventide; the darkness deepens.

“The train terminates at Waverley,” the old woman had said, but she was wrong after all. It terminated here.

He supposed time had expanded as it did in all accidents, but how long could it carry on for? What if it went on forever? What if this was hell? Was he dead? Did everything hurt this much when you were dead?

Climb over seats, climb over people, forget anything your mother ever taught you about manners, but it didn’t work like that, not in reality.

There were days that really surprised you with the way they turned out.

He had been trying to find the roof of the carriage but there had been no roof to find—it had peeled back like the top of a sardine can, and Jackson and his accidental new companion had plunged straight out of the train and down an embankment and now they were lying in a kind of gully.

A nagging little voice in his head was trying to remind him that if he went to sleep now, it would be the big one, the last one.

He was surprised, he had expected to fight at the end but it was actually a relief to close his eyes. He was so tired.

“Did you keep all that stuff, newspaper clippings, articles?” Joanna Hunter laughed drily. “I was six years old. I didn’t get to keep anything.”

Don’t make eye contact. Walk past briskly, don’t draw attention to yourself. Somewhere, in some Utopian nowhere, women walked without fear. Louise would sure like to see that place. Give medals to all the women.

The first Mrs. de Winter, Samantha, had been the green-thumbed type.

“Lovely,” Louise said to Joanna Hunter, breathing in the scent of the winter honeysuckle. She wasn’t lying, it was lovely. Joanna Hunter was lovely, her house was lovely, her baby was lovely.

You would certainly have thought twice before saying “I do” to Howard Mason. “My Last Duchess”—the Browning poem—came unexpectedly into her mind. The thought brought a chill with it.

Louise cared, about Alison Needler, about Joanna Hunter. Jackson Brodie had cared about missing girls, he wanted them all found. Louise didn’t want them to get lost in the first place.

At the thought of Jackson Brodie, her heart gave a guilty little twitch.

One day David Needler was going to come back. And when he did, Louise was going to get him.

What was she doing? She was living with a dead woman’s things.

Louise remembered a ballad or poem set in some long-ago time when a wedding had taken place in a great house and all the guests had played hide-and-seek as part of the celebrations (imagine that now).

“The Mistletoe Bride,” that was what it was called.