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

by Kate Atkinson

Love is patient, love is kind, she reminded herself. But should she really be taking marital advice from a misogynist

She had held a man’s hand while a doctor amputated his leg at the scene.

She hadn’t needed to go, but she was police, that’s what you did.

Louise didn’t care what kind of shit was thrown her way, it had to be better than the company of Bridget and Tim.

His voice was a gravelly Glaswegian that sounded as if he’d breakfasted on cigarettes. Twenty years ago she too would have found his moodiness attractive. Now she just wanted to punch him.

He had liar written all the way through him, like a stick of rock.

Who would have guessed that Joanna Hunter had once been the Annie Oakley of medical students? She could run, she could shoot. She was all ready for the next time.

What was new was a note, stuck on the door with chewing gum, that read, “Reggie Chase—you cant hide from us.” No apostrophe. She took some time reading this message and then took some time wondering why her front door wasn’t locked.

Who was us? Who were these people who didn’t know how to use an apostrophe? They must be looking for Billy. Billy knew a lot of ungrammatical people.

This was her home, this was Mum’s home, and it was wrecked. Desecrated. It wasn’t as if it was much to begin with, but it was all Reggie had.

haven’t seen him for ages. Honestly.” The men exchanged a puzzled look. Ginger said, “Who’s Billy? We’re looking for a guy called Reggie.” “Never heard of him. Sweartogod.”

Unbelievably, the men made to leave. “We’ll be back,” the blond one said. Then the other, carroty one said, “Got a present for you,” and pulled a book from his pocket—unmistakably a Loeb Classic—and tossed it to her like a grenade.

Had they really been looking for her? Made a mistake about her gender (“a guy called Reggie”)?

The thing was, when Mr. Hunter was speaking to her on the phone, Reggie had heard Sadie bark in the background. When she wasn’t at work, Dr. Hunter took Sadie with her everywhere, so why would she leave her behind?

A long time ago, a long, long time ago, when the world was much younger and so was Jackson, he had his blood group tattooed on his chest, just above his heart.

so that when you are shot or blown up, the medics can treat you as quickly as possible.

Call-Me-Mike was too young to be a doctor. Jackson wondered if the nurses knew that a boy from the local primary school was loose on the wards.

“Just humor him,” the fuzzy—now less fuzzy—nurse murmured in Jackson’s ear. “He thinks he’s a grown-up.”

The junior registrar, “Dr. Samms, call me Charlie,” looked like Harry Potter. Jackson didn’t really want to be treated by a doctor who looked like Harry Potter, but he wasn’t in a position to argue.

“Who am I?” he asked. He sounded like an amateur philosopher, but it wasn’t a metaphysical question. Really, who was he? “Your name’s Andrew Decker,” she said. “Really?” Jackson said.

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.

When would they let him go home? “How about when you know where you live?” Dr. Foster offered. “Fair enough,” Jackson said.

In fact, she wasn’t going back to that flat for anything. She just wished that her books and A-level course work had been left undefiled.

She might be technically an adult, but really she was just a child. You couldn’t make people who were almost children be responsible for dead bodies. Could you?

She’d identified a dead body, had her flat vandalized, and been threatened by violent idiots, and it wasn’t even lunchtime.

No point in telling him that she’d been on her shopping spree because two jokers had wrecked her house and her clothes.

When Mr. Hunter had gone back in the house and shut the door, Reggie counted the money. It was half of what Dr. Hunter gave her.

Here was the thing. Dr. Hunter had traveled to Hawes last night. “She drove down last night,” Mr. Hunter said on the phone this morning. So why was her car in the garage?

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.

Only alcoholics smelled of alcohol at nine in the morning. (Her mother. Always.)

Louise was sure that buried deep inside her, lurking in the murky labyrinth of her heart, there was an incredibly well-behaved person wondering when she would ever be let out.

Everyone remembered Lord Lucan’s name, but hardly anyone remembered Sandra Rivett, the nanny he clubbed to death.

The forgotten dead. Victims faded, murderers lived on in the memory, only the police kept the eternal flame alight, passing it on as the years went by.

Louise hated Starbucks. Drinking the Yankee dollar. “Someone has to make money for the evil capitalists,” she said to the girl, buying her a latte and a chocolate muffin. “Some days it’s you and me. This is one of those days.”

She was a romantic, quite possibly a fantasist. Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey.

She said she had saved the life of a man at the train crash. More fantasy, obviously. Louise should have sent a uniform to talk to her.

Joanna Hunter had never told Reggie about what had happened to her when she was a child. In fact, she hadn’t told anyone as far as Louise could see, apart from her husband, and Louise wasn’t about to break that confidence.

Louise thought of Jackson, his sister had been murdered a long time ago, and now he was the only one left who had known her.

And she loved the baby. Gabriel—of course, Gabriel, Gabrielle. The baby was named for Joanna Hunter’s dead mother.

She turned the postcard over and read the message. Read the name and address. “Jackson Brodie,” the girl said hopefully. “I don’t know if he’s alive or dead, though. Maybe you could have a wee look for him?”

Reggie wondered if Inspector Monroe had ever suffered a broken heart. She didn’t look the type somehow.

Inspector Monroe gave her a doubtful look as if she were considering putting her in the fantasizing psycho box after all. “I gave a man CPR,” Reggie said, climbing deeper into the box.

Reggie supposed that when someone went away, it must seem to their pets that they’d simply disappeared off the face of the earth. Here one minute, gone the next.

The sofa Reggie was sleeping on still bore the faint imprint of Banjo’s body, but there was a kind of comfort in that. It had been an unbelievably difficult day. Hard times, indeed.

If Dr. Hunter were okay she would have phoned, if not to speak to Reggie, then to Sadie (“Hello, puppy, how’s my gorgeous girl?”). Where was Dr. Hunter? Elle revient. What if she didn’t?

Jackson felt a pang of something very like loneliness. He wanted someone he knew to know he was here.

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.

“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.

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.

When Reggie had showed her the postcard of Bruges and said, “I don’t know whether he’s alive or dead,” her heart had done the kind of flip-flop of fear with