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

by Kate Atkinson

which it would have greeted bad news about Archie.

“We’ve only just identified him,” the nurse said. “We thought he was called Andrew Decker.” “Who?”

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.

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.

It wasn’t the girl, the girl was there every time he opened his eyes, sitting at the side of his

bed, watching him.

In the dream he had opened his heart and ...

“You’re going the wrong way.” His head hurt. Too much thinking makes Jackson a dull boy.

She had finally found him and now she was keeping a faithful vigil by his bedside, Greyfriars Reggie.

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.

“I’ll be back,” she’d said to Jackson Brodie. “I really will,” she’d added. Reggie was never going to be a person who didn’t come back.

She began to feel panicky, the way she felt when she was first told that Mum was dead. Where was Dr. Hunter? Where was Dr. Hunter? Where was she?

If she ever kissed Jackson, it would be the end of decency and good manners. A pair of tigers roaring in the night.

It was only because she saw an obituary in the newspaper that she knew her own father was dead.

She was bereft, her whole life an act of bereavement, longing for something that she could no longer remember.

Reggie got off the bus and turned the corner of the street to find that the all-too-familiar calling cards of catastrophe were waiting for her—three fire engines, an ambulance, two police cars, some kind of incident van, and a knot of bystanders—all muddled up in the street outside her flat.

Reggie didn’t mean to cry, but she was so tired and so small and her face hurt where the book had hit it and the world was so full of big men telling people they were dead.

She should have said, “I have no idea how to love another human being unless it’s by tearing them to pieces and eating them.”

He had taken her on, thinking she would improve, get better under his patient care, he must be disappointed in her by now. The rose with the worm, the bowl with the crack.

She felt a stab of guilt. Reggie’s fantasies were all proving to be grounded in reality, but kidnap—really? (“Kidnapped! Dr. Hunter’s been kidnapped.”) Crazy, crazy talk.

She had an awful feeling that Reggie Chase might be right, something bad had happened to Joanna Hunter.

Patrick had suggested next April in Paris, “a long weekend,” and she had shied away because secretly she was saving Paris for Jackson, which was clearly ridiculous.

Didn’t it make sense that two of the most provoking people she could think of would somehow be together.

“Absolutely against my advice,” Harry Potter said when Jackson discharged himself. “Be it on your own head,” Dr. Foster said. “You’re a bloody idiot, mate,” Australian Mike laughed.

Louise wondered if he had a fever or if she was imagining it because of her own overheated state. She wanted him to hold her, she wanted to let her bones melt, even if for a moment.

“Actually, you can drive, I’m feeling tired, I’ll sit in the back,” because she couldn’t bear to be so close to Jackson and not be able to touch him again.

Her heart lifted, she would see him again tomorrow.

“This is Jackson Brodie, the man I should have married.” Not married. Marriage was for fools. The man she should have run away with. Over the hills and far away.

With hindsight, Reggie could see now that perhaps she should have mentioned her criminal relations to Jackson Brodie.

He should have kissed her. He had held back because they were both married, but maybe he was using that as an excuse, maybe he was just a coward.

She knew that this was the dark place she had always been destined to find again. Just because a terrible thing happened to you once didn’t mean it couldn’t happen again.

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

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.”

Then she got clean clothes from Dr. Hunter’s bedroom and the baby’s room—more fingerprint dust—and they looked as good as new. Not Reggie, Reggie was old, she had lived a lifetime in a day.

There was a chasm between them now that could never be bridged because he could never tell her the truth. She was always going to be in his past, never in his future. “You should go home, Louise.” “So should you.”

no one by the name of Tessa Webb was on the passenger manifest.

He retrieved his passport and went to the bank to draw money out and discovered that he didn’t have any. The same with his investments.

Tessa gone, the money gone, Bernie gone. It had all been one big setup, right from that initial “chance” encounter on Regent Street.

She ran out into the street, holding the puppy in her arms. She could feel the fast heartbeat against her own.

She stood in the middle of the road and willed Jackson to come back. But he didn’t.

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 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.

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!

At least he had the money that Reggie’s precious doctor gave him for the Makarov.

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.