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

by Kate Atkinson

These people had a well-developed radar for the wrong kind of stranger. They probably burned a wicker man every summer.

“ ‘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.” “Flush,” Reggie said. “Virginia Woolf wrote a book about him. I’ve read around the subject.”

The truck driver was texting. A classic. Louise arrested him at the scene. She would have liked to kill him at the scene. Or preferably run him over slowly with his own truck. She was beginning to notice that she was more bloodthirsty than she used to be (and that was saying something).

She seemed to be more fainthearted than she used to be. Bloodthirsty yet fainthearted.

The driver of the car in front had been badly injured as well, and it had been Patrick who had spent hours in the operating theater putting the man’s leg back together. The truck driver, who didn’t even have a bruise, was sentenced to three years in jail and was probably out by now. Louise would have removed his organs without anesthetic and given them to more worthy people. Or so she told Patrick afterwards over a nasty cup of coffee in the hospital staff canteen. “Life’s random,” he said. “The best you can do is pick up the pieces.” He wasn’t police but it wasn’t like marrying out. He understood.

said. She liked the way he took over in that authoritative way, didn’t stand for any of her shit yet was always amiable about it, as if she were precious and yet flawed and the flaws could be fixed.

The therapist, a hippie-ish,

ish, well-intentioned woman called Jenny who looked as if she’d knitted herself, told Louise to visualize a place where she could put all her negative thoughts and Louise had chosen a chest at the bottom of the sea, the kind that was beloved of pirates in storybooks—hooped and banded with metal, padlocked and hasped to keep safe, not treasure, but Louise’s unhelpful thoughts.

The problem was that when she had safely locked up all the negative thoughts at the bottom of the sea, there was nothing else left, no positive thoughts at all. “Guess I’m just not a positive person,” she said to Jenny.

How wonderfully, joyously untrammeled he had been then in his happiness. She thought it was fixed forever, didn’t realize that childhood happiness dissolves away, because she herself had never known happiness as a child. If she had realized that Archie wasn’t going to be that sunny innocent forever, she would have laid up every moment as treasure. Then she could have it again if she wanted. The north wind howled. She shut the door.

Twenty-six years old, Marcus had a BA in media studies from Stirling (who didn’t?) and a head of hair that would have given Shirley Temple a run for her money if he had allowed it to grow instead of sensibly shearing it into astrakhan.

He was a sweet boy, downright cherubic, straight as a Roman road, tougher than he looked, and always cheerful.

“Ah, a holiday romance!” and Louise didn’t say, Actually, he picked her up in a bar on Gran Canaria and she never could remember his name, which hardly mattered as he wasn’t the only contender for the coveted role of totally absent father to Louise.

There would be traces of his sister in that single hair. Niamh, killed so long ago now that she existed more as a story than a person, a tale to be told, My sister was murdered when she was eighteen.

How ironic that both Julia and Louise, the two women he’d felt closest to in his recent past, had both unexpectedly got married, and neither of them to him.

Tonight Banjo was lethargic and showed no interest in going out, lying instead in front of the heat of the gas fire. Reggie was grateful, it was a horrible night, gusts of wind repeatedly lifting and dropping the brass knocker on Ms. MacDonald’s front door, so that it sounded as if an unseen visitor were desperate to get in. 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.

He could feel the lifeblood ebbing away. On a couple of previous occasions when Jackson had found himself facing the possibility of death, he had clung on to life because he considered himself too young to die. Now it struck him that that wasn’t really the case anymore, he felt plenty old enough to die.

Louise had been there, been there with Archie when he was little, at the empty play parks and deserted duck ponds, suddenly aware of the nutter’s sloping walk, his shifting gaze. 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.

Andrew Decker had done his A levels, got an Open University degree in philosophy (of course), showed no sign of wishing harm to anyone. Right. And thirty years ago he’d slaughtered a family when, according to his workmates, he’d been “an ordinary guy.” Yeah, Louise thought, you had to watch out for the ordinary ones.

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. There were a lot of ways of getting lost, not all of them involved being missing. Not all of them involved hiding.

Sometimes women got lost right there in plain sight. Alison Needler, making accommodations, disappearing inside her own marriage, a little more every day. Jackson’s sister stepping off a bus and stepping out of her life one evening in the rain. Gabrielle Mason gone forever on a sunny afternoon.

Quite a few people on the bus had given Reggie funny looks because of the way she was dressed, and a couple of girls on the top deck, no more than twelve, all fruity lip gloss and incredibly tedious secrets, openly sniggered at the clothes she was wearing. Reggie felt like saying, You try going through the wardrobe of a middle-aged, born-again ex-teacher to find something you could wear in public without attracting scorn.

It wasn’t fair, he thought peevishly. “Who said life was fair?” his father had said to him a hundred times. He had said the same himself to his own daughter. (“It’s not fair, Daddy.”) Parents were miserable buggers. It should be fair. It should be paradise. Death, Jackson noticed, had made him crabbed. He shouldn’t be here, he should be with Niamh—wherever that was—the idyllic place where all the dead girls walked, risen up and honored. Fuck. His head really hurt. Not fair.

Louise had been a grown-up for longer than most people her age. “Making up for it now.” Apparently.

She sighed as if patients were always bickering about their dead or alive status. “Yes. Technically dead,” she conceded. “Very briefly.”

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.

“I used to be a policeman,” Jackson said. Every time he hit the dead end of the existential labyrinth, he seemed to find it necessary to assert this. His identity might have been called into question, but of this one fact he was sure.

It felt unnaturally early, sparrowfart time of day by the feel and sound of it. She fumbled for her spectacles. Yes indeed, the digital numbers on the bedside clock glowed a Halloween green and confirmed that it was all the fives, five fifty-five.

Joanna didn’t believe in God, how could she, but she believed in the existence of the soul, believed indeed in the transference of the soul, and although she wouldn’t have stood up at a scientific conference and declared it, she also believed that she carried the souls of her dead family inside her and one day the baby would do the same for her. Just because you were a rational and skeptical atheist didn’t mean that you didn’t have to get through every day the best way you could. There were no rules.

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.

A big, deeply unattractive man in a white wife-beater vest opened the door and stared unwelcomingly at them. She could hear a racing commentary blaring from a television somewhere in the background. He had a can of lager in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He was a formidable cliché, Louise felt like congratulating him on his near-iconic status.

“Boss?” Marcus said, appearing at her side. “Okay?” “Fine,” she said, using the universal Scottish word for every state of being from “I’m dying in anguish” to “I’m experiencing euphoric joy.” “Fine,” she said, “I’m fine.” And then they did what you do in places like this. They went to a café and had afternoon tea.

What he had felt for most of his life was that he was living on in the aftermath of a disaster, in the endless postscript of time that was his life following the murder of his sister and the suicide of his brother.

He had drawn those terrible feelings inside himself, nourished them in solitary confinement until they formed the hard, black nugget of coal at the heart of his soul, but now the disaster was external, the wreckage was tangible, it was outside the room he was sleeping in.

“We’re all survivors, Mr. B.,” ...

“Nothing to be ashamed of,” Reggie said. “It’s like”—she said the phrase with a flourish—“a badge of courage. You pulled that soldier out of the wreckage, didn’t you? Just a shame he was dead.” “Thanks.” “You’re a hero.” “No, I’m not,” Jackson said. I used to be a policeman, he thought. I used to be a man. Now I can’t step on a train.

Sorry, kid, Louise thought. She hadn’t wanted to be the one to tell Reggie about Joanna Hunter’s past. As she expected, this information made Reggie even more vocal. (“Murdered? Her whole family?”) The girl was a terrier, you had to hand it to her. She wasn’t even related to Joanna Hunter and yet she seemed to care about her more than anyone else. Louise couldn’t imagine Archie feeling like this about her.

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.

She became a doctor because she wanted to help people. It was a terrible cliché but it was true (but not true of all doctors).

She had spent the thirty years since the murders creating a life. It wasn’t a real life, it was the simulacrum of one, but it worked. Her real life had been left behind in that other, golden field. And then she had the baby and her love for him breathed life into the simulacrum and it became genuine. Her love for the baby was immense, bigger than the entire universe. Fierce.

When they came downstairs again, all the police in the house looked completely stunned at the sight of them. One of the forensic officers said, “Who are you?” and Dr. Hunter said, “Joanna Hunter,” and the forensic officer said, “What are you doing, this is a crime scene, you’re compromising it,” and Dr. Hunter said, “What crime scene?” and the policeman said, “A kidnapping,” and then looked as if he felt pretty stupid because the kidnap victim was sitting right in front of him

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 would 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.

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 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. But then she stirred in her sleep and for a moment he was so choked he could hardly speak. Then he found his voice and stuck his hand in the air and shouted louder than he’d ever shouted in his life, or would ever shout again, “Over here, I’ve found her, she’s over here!”

And he lifted her up and held her as if she might break, as if she were the most precious, miraculous, astonishing child ever to walk the earth, and to the first person who reached them, a police constable, he said, “Look at that, not a scratch on her.”

I never set out do anything, I should say first. The question of genre has been much more prominent in America, I’ve noticed. I set out to write a book in the same way I always set out to write a book. I didn’t think, I’m going to write a book that’s a mystery or a crime novel.

And once you put a detective into a book it becomes a crime novel. There doesn’t seem to be any way around that. Not that I wouldn’t want to write a crime novel but, you know, that’s it, it’s become one. I still don’t think I write crime novels. But everyone else now does.

You kind of have to remain true to how you feel about your writing. Otherwise you get very confused because you’d be trying to please readers. And how could you possibly please readers? You can’t. The only person you can please is yourself.

When you suddenly realize a hundred or so pages into the book you’re writing that it’s quite complicated, and it’s going to get more complicated, then you begin to worry that you can’t actually do it.