Текст книги "When Will There Be Good News?"

Автор книги: Kate Atkinson

Соавторы: Kate Atkinson,Kate Atkinson
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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

She knew it was wrong but Reggie felt more affected by the dog's death than she did by his owner's. Reggie stroked Banjo's ears and closed his dim eyes. The dead guy, the soldier, last night had his eyes half-open but Reggie hadn't closed them. There'd been no time for such niceties. The Asian policeman was wrong, everybody was dead. It was like being cursed. It was like being in some horror movie. Carrie. All those people on the train, perhaps they should be on her conscience as well. 'Troubled teen or angel of death?' she said to the dead dog. 'You have to wonder.' Was the man dead too? Perhaps instead of saving him she had killed him, simply by being near to him. Not the breath of life but the kiss of death.

He was the second man she'd come across after half sliding, half falling down the muddy embankment. The first one was the soldier. Reggie shone her torch on him and moved on. She expected there would be plenty of time later to think about how he looked dead. The torchbeam was thin and wavery. Thigh high, not eye high. Mum had once worked as an usherette at the Dominion but was sacked after two weeks for eating ice-creams without paying for them.

The second man had a pulse, pretty weak, but a pulse was a pulse. His arm was a mess, he was bleeding from an artery and, in the absence of anything else, Reggie took off her jacket, rolled up a sleeve and used it as a pad to press on to the bleeding arm the way that Dr Hunter had shown her. Reggie tried calling out for help but they were down in a dip where no one could see or hear them. The first sirens had begun to wail in the distance.

She checked the pulse in the man's neck again and this time couldn't find one. Her fingers were slippery with his blood, perhaps she was mistaken? She felt herself beginning to panic. She thought about Eliot, the CPR dummy that Dr Hunter had brought home. Eliot wasn't anything like the man whose life was suddenly and unexpectedly in her hands. She couldn't work out how to breathe into his mouth -let alone do the heart compressions -without taking the pressure off his bleeding artery. It was like a nightmare game ofTwister. She thought of the Spanish waiter trying to breathe life into her mother's lungs. Had he felt this same sense of desperation? What if he had kept on going a little longer, what if her mother hadn't been dead but in a watery suspension, waiting to be restored to life? The thought galvanized Reggie and she transferred her knee on to the improvised pressure-pad and then stretched over the man's body like a large awkward spider. She could manage it if she really tried.

'Just hang on,' she said to the man. 'Please. For my sake if not for yours.' She breathed in as deeply as she could and put her mouth over his. He tasted of cheese and onion crisps.

Reggie took the bus home from Ms MacDonald's house. Before leaving she had wrapped Banjo's body in an old cardigan of Ms MacDonald's and dug a hole for him in one of the flowerbeds. A little parcel of bones. It had been like the Somme in Ms MacDonald's back garden and it had been a horrible task dropping the small body into the unfriendly, muddy hole. Nada y pues nada, as Hemingway and Ms MacDonald would have said. First things were good, last things not so much so. As Reggie would have said.

It had rained when they buried Mum as well, dropped her into her own muddy hole. There were quite a few mourners at the graveside -Billy, Gary, Sue and Carl from Warrington -which was nice of them considering they hardly knew Mum -a couple of Gary's biker mates, some neighbours, Mary, Trish and Jean, of course, quite a lot of co-workers from the supermarket, the manager himself in black tie and black suit even though the month before he'd threatened Mum with her cards for 'persistently poor timekeeping'. Even the Man-Who-Came-Before-Gary turned up, lurking in the cemetery's hinterland. Billy made an obscene gesture at him which caused the vicar to stumble over his intonement.

'Not a bad turnout,' Carl said as if he was some kind of professional funeral inspector.

'Poor Jackie,' Sue said.

In the church beforehand they had sung 'Abide With Me', a hymn chosen by Reggie on the grounds that Mum always cried when she heard it because they had sung it at her own mother's funeral. Reggie had arranged the service with the help ofMary, Trish andJean. Mum wasn't a churchgoer so it was hard to know what she would have liked. 'Aye, hatched, matched and dispatched within a church, like most of us,' Trish said as if she was saying something wise. 'There must be something, when you think about it,' Jean said. Reggie didn't see why there had to be anything. 'We're all alone,' Dr Hunter once said to her. 'All alone and cast adrift in the vast infinity ofspace' (was she thinking about Laika?) , and Reggie said, 'But we have each other, Dr H.,' and Dr Hunter said, 'Yes we do, Reggie. We have each other.'

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. Lacking any other option, Reggie had chosen the most nondescript ofMs MacDonald's garments she could find -a viscose cream sweater, a nylon maroon anorak and pair of polyester black slacks rolled over a hundred times at the waist and held up with a belt. As far as Reggie could tell Ms MacDonald didn't own (hadn't owned) a single garment that wasn't made from synthetic fibres. It was only when she put on Ms MacDonald's clothes that Reggie realized just how big and tall she had been before she shrank inside her clothes so that they had draped themselves on her body as if she were no more than a coat hanger.

'That's a big-boned woman,' Mum said after she met Ms MacDonald for the first time at a parents' evening. Reggie thought of Mum, awkward and ill-at-ease at the horrible posh school, Ms MacDonald rattling on about Aeschylus as if Mum had the foggiest. Now they were both dead (not to mention Aeschylus). Everyone was dead.

Reggie didn't put on Ms MacDonald's underwear, the big pants and stretched grey bras were a step too far. Her own clothes were still drying on a rack in Ms MacDonald's bathroom, except for her jacket which was so saturated with the man's blood that it was past the point of rescue. 'Out damned spot,' she said to the wheelie-bin as she threw the jacket into it. They had done Macbeth for standard grade.

Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?

He wasn't that old. Old enough to be her father. His name was Jackson Brodie. She'd had his blood on her hands, warm blood in the cold night. She had been washed in his blood.

As he was being loaded on to the stretcher she had plunged her hand into his jacket pocket, hoping to find some form of identity, and had pulled out a postcard with a picture ofBruges on the front, and on the back his address and a message -Dear Dad, Bruges is very interesting, it has a lot of nice buildings. It is raining. Have eaten a lot ofchips and chocolate. Missing you! Love you! Marlee XXx.

The postcard was still in her bag, muddy and bloody and wrinkled up. She had two postcards now, their bright messages touched with death. She supposed she should hand the man's in to someone. She would like to give it back to the man himself. Ifhe was still alive. The air ambulance doctor told her they were taking him to the Royal Infirmary but when she had phoned this morning they had no record of a Jackson Brodie. Reggie wondered if that meant he had died.

Adam Lay Ybounden NOT DEAD THEN, NOT YET. NOT EXACTLY ALIVE THOUGH. IN SOME mysterious place in between.

He'd always imagined it, ifhe'd imagined it at all, as something like the Hilton in Heathrow Airport -a beige, bland limbo where everyone was in transit. If he had paid more attention during his Catholic childhood he might have remembered Purgatory's purifying flames. They now consumed him continually, a fire with no end as if he was some kind of everlasting fuel. Nor could he recollect any teaching that had ever referred to the continuous radio static in the head and the sensation of giant millipedes crawling allover his skin and the other, even more unpleasant feeling, that large clackety-clack cockroaches were grazing on his brains. He wondered what other surprises God's halfway house was going to present.

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 honoured. Fuck. His head really hurt. Not fair.

*

People came to visit him occasionally. His mother, his father, his brother. They were all dead so Jackson knew he must be too. They were vague round the edges and if he tried to look at them for too long they started to wobble and fade. He supposed he was vague round the edges too.

The catalogue of the dead seemed full of random choices. His old geography teacher, an antagonistic, apoplectic sort who had a fatal stroke in the staff room. Jackson's first ever girlfriend, a nice straightforward girl called Angela who died of an aneurysm in her husband's arms on her thirtieth birthday. Mrs Patterson, an old neighbour who used to sit drinking tea and gossiping with his mother when Jackson was small. Jackson hadn't thought about her in decades, would have been hard put to name her if she hadn't turned up at his bedside, smelling of camphor and carrying an old leatherette shopping bag. Julia's sister, Amelia, came once (as recalcitrant as ever) to sit at his bedside. He wondered ifher presence meant that she had died on the operating table. The woman in red from the train appeared one afternoon, distinctly less vivacious than the last time he saw her. The dead were legion. He wished they would stop coming to see him.

It was exhausting being dead. He had more of a social life than when he was alive. It wasn't as ifthey had any conversation, the most he had got out of them was a vague mumbling, although Amelia had, to his baillement, suddenly shouted, 'Stuffing!' to him, and a middleaged woman he had never seen before bent down to whisper in his ear to ask if he had seen her dog. His brother never visited and his sister never came back. She was the only person he really wanted to see.

He was woken by a small terrier barking at the foot of the bed. He knew he wasn't really awake, not by any previous definition of the word. The voice of Mr Spock (or Leonard Nimoy, depending how you looked at it) murmured in his ear, 'It's life,Jackson, but not as we know it.'

He'd had enough. He was getting out of this madhouse, even if it killed him. He opened his eyes. 'You're back with us then?' a woman's voice said. Someone loomed in and out of his vision. Fuzzy round the edges.

'Fuzzy,' he said. Maybe he only said it in his head. He was III hospital. The fuzzy person was a nurse. He was alive. Apparently. 'Hello, soldier,' the nurse said.

Outlaw WHAT WERE THEY DOING UP AT THIS UNEARTHLY HOUR? ALL FOUR of them back at the dining table, breakfasting together this time. Patrick had made French toast, served it with creme fraiche, out-ofseason raspberries, the Wedgwood plates snowy with icing sugar as if they were in a restaurant. The raspberries had been flown all the way from Mexico.

Bridget and Tim had slept undisturbed but Louise had been up for hours at the train-crash site. She felt drained of her lifeblood, but Patrick, who had operated throughout the night as one accident victim after another was wheeled into theatre, was his usual chipper self. Mr Fix-it.

Louise poured a cup of coffee and contemplated the red raspberries on the white plate, drops of blood in the snow. A fairy tale. She felt sick with tiredness. She was trapped in a nightmare, it was like that Bufmel film where they all sit down to eat but never get any food, only in this case she was constantly being faced with food she couldn't stomach.

Bridget had once been a fashion buyer for a department store chain although you would never have guessed it to look at her. She was wearing an aggressive three-piece outfit that was probably very expensive but had the kind of pattern you would get if you cut up the flags of several obscure countries and then gave them to a blind pigeon to stick back together again.

Tim had been the head honcho in a big accountancy company and had taken 'the luxury of early retirement'. 'I'm a golf widow,' Bridget said with an expression ofmock bereavement. Bridget didn't say what she did with her time now and Louise didn't ask because she suspected that the answer would irritate her. Patrick was good Irish, Bridget was bad Irish.

'Mexican raspberries,' Louise said. 'How absurd is that? Talk about leaving a carbon footprint.' 'Oh, too early in the day, Louise,' Tim said, holding a hand to his forehead effetely. 'Let's leave the food miles off the breakfast table.' 'Where else do they belong?' Louise said. Guess who was the bolshy kid in this family?

'Louise didn't have a rebellious phase when she was a teenager,' Patrick said. 'She's making up for it now, apparently.' He laughed and Louise gave him a long look. Was he patronizing her? Of course it was true, she hadn't had a mutinous youth because it was hard to kick against the traces when your own mother was corning in late (if at all) and puking her guts up like the best of badly behaved teenagers. Louise had been a grown-up for longer than most people her age. Making up for it now. Apparently. She'd never had a father to speak of -one night on Gran Canaria hardly counted -and she wondered if that was Patrick's appeal, had she subconsciously seen him as the father figure she had never had -was that how he had got past her defences and under her duvet? What did that make her -a complex Electra?

'I don't think it's rebellious to want to talk about the politics of consumption,' she said to Tim. 'Do you?'

While he was searching for an answer she turned to Patrick and said, 'French toast. Or eggy bread as we in the lower classes used to call it.'Why didn't she just poke him with a fork?

'My father worked for Dublin Corporation all his life,' Patrick said genially. 'I hardly think that qualified us for belonging to the upper echelons of society.' He was an Irishman, his weapons were words, whereas Louise was by her nature a street-fighter and for a brief but satisfYing moment thought about throwing his precious French toast at his head. Patrick smiled at her. Positively beamish. She smiled back. Marriage -tough love.

'Oh, I don't know about that, Paddy,' Bridget -the other half of 'us' -piped up. 'It wasn't as if Dada was a dustman, he was a surveyor. The Brennans were never what you would call lower class.'

'Huzzah for the bourgeoisie,' Louise said. 'Oops, did I say that out loud? I didn't mean to.'

'Louise,' Patrick said gently, laying a hand on her arm.

'Louise what?' she said, shaking his arm off.

'There goes the diet,' Bridget said, gamely ignoring everyone and forking up her food. Louise wanted to say Looks to me like it went a long time ago, but managed to zip her lips.

'Eat something, Louise,' Patrick coaxed. There he went again, Dada knows best. Love is patient love is kind, she reminded herself. But should she really be taking marital advice from a misogynist firstcentury Roman? 'French bread, eggy toast, whatever you want to call it,' he said, 'you should eat.'

'Shame about last night,' Bridget said. 'That the train crash wrecked dinner?' Louise said. 'Yeah, big shame.' 'Thank goodness we decided to come up by car,' Tim said. Louise wondered about pouring coffee on his balding head.

'I am aware it was a terrible disaster,' Bridget said primly. 'Poor Paddy was operating all night.' Louise didn't count, of course. Patrick was a saint. He saved people, according to Bridget. 'He saves their hips, usually,' Louise said and Patrick barked a laugh.

Nice and clean in an operating theatre, only a bit ofblood, patients quiet and well-behaved. Not down and dirty on a rail track, soaked with rain, finding severed limbs and listening to people crying out, or worse, not crying out at all. She had held a man's hand while a doctor amputated his leg at the scene. She was still wearing her diamond ring, its facets glinting in the emergency arc lights. She hadn't needed to go, but she was police, that's what you did.

'Are the transport police handling the investigation?'Tim asked, all pomp and no circumstance, as if he knew something about accident procedure.

'They're providing the deputy SIO,' Louise said without elaboration. 'Senior Investigating Officer,' Patrick said helpfully when Tim looked blank. Or blanker than usual. 'But isn't there a -what's it called, Rail Accident Investigation Bureau now?'

'Branch.' Louise sighed. 'It's called the Rail Accident Investigation Branch. The transport police aren't big enough in Scotland to handle this investigation.'

'And sudden loss of life immediately involves the Procurator Fiscal,' Patrick said. 'But why-' Christ on a bike. How boring could you get?

Louise didn't care what kind ofshit was thrown her way, it had to be better than the company of Bridget and Tim. Patrick was taking them to St Andrews today.

'I hope neither ofyou are thinking ofplaying golf?' Bridget asked fretfully.

'Oh, you never know, we might get a round in,' Patrick laughed. He was relentlessly good-humoured with his sister, downright twinkly, in fact. It seemed to mollifY her quite successfully and Louise wondered if she could manage twinkly. It felt like a stretch.

Patrick touched the back of Louise's hand with the back of his fingertips, gently, as if she were sick, possibly terminal. 'We were thinking of driving up to Glamis tomorrow. We'd like it if you came with us. I'd like it,' he added softly. 'I know you're not working tomorrow.'

'Actually something came up. And I am. Working.'

'Drive carefully,' Louise said as she finally escaped the breakfast table. 'I always drive carefully.' 'Other people don't.'

She could have walked round to the Hunters' but she didn't, she drove.

Ifyou had a good arm you could probably have stood on the roof of their block of flats and thrown a rock that would have landed in the Hunters' driveway. Yesterday Joanna Hunter, today Neil Hunter. Two completely different visits with two completely different goals, but it seemed a very strange coincidence that she should need to drop in on both husband and wife in the space of two days. A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen, Jackson Brodie had said to her once but no matter how you looked at it there was no relation between Andrew Decker's release and Neil Hunter's present troubles. And just because Jackson Brodie said something didn't make it true. He was hardly the oracle of crime-solving.

The Hunters' house was dead-eyed and quiet. Louise parked next to Mr Hunter's showy beast of a black-badged Range Rover, a bigger threat to the planet than Mexican raspberries.

Louise rang the front-door bell and when Neil Hunter answered she showed him her warrant card and with her best rise-and-shine smile said, 'Good morning, Mr Hunter.'

Neil Hunter looked rough, although still on the good side of haggard. Louise could see why someone like Joanna Hunter would be attracted to him. He was everything she wasn't.

He was wearing Levi's and an old Red Sox T-shirt, a wolfin wolf's clothing. She could smell last night's whisky still breathing out from his pores. He looked rumpled enough in both face and clothes to have just got out of bed except that Louise could smell coffee and see that there were plastic files and papers scattered across the kitchen table as if he had been up all night doing his accounts. Perhaps he'd been working out if the insurance payout from the arcade fire would cover his tax.

The table was a big old-fashioned thing that you half expected to see a Victorian cook kneading dough on. Bridget and Tim's wedding present to them, hauled out of the boot of the car yesterday, had been a breadmaker. 'A good one,' Bridget said, 'not one of the cheap ones.' Louise wondered how long she would have to wait before she could drop it into a charity shop. There were not many things in life that Louise was sure of but she would bet the house on the fact that she was going to go to her grave without ever having made a loaf of bread.

Neil Hunter glanced at the warrant card and said, 'Detective Chief Inspector,' with a sardonic lift of the eyebrow, as if there was something amusing about her rank. His voice was a gravelly Glaswegian that sounded as ifhe'd breakfasted on cigarettes. Twenty years ago she too would have found his moodiness attractive. Now she just wanted to punch him. But then she seemed to want to punch everyone at the moment.

'Mind if I come in for a minute?' she said, no slippage in her jaunty persona. She was over the threshold before he could protest. Police weren't like vampires, they didn't wait to be invited in.

'I'd like to have a word, about the arcade fire.' 'The fire investigation report's come back?' he said. He looked relieved, as if he'd expected her to tell him something else.

'Yes. I'm afraid the fire was started deliberately.' He didn't exactly throw up his hands in shock and horror. Resignation, if anything. Or maybe indifference. The house was surprisingly quiet. No sign of Dr Hunter or her baby. Or the girl. The one good thing about the train crash, ifyou could say that, which you couldn't really, was that it had got in the way of any lurid stories about Andrew Decker's release or the current whereabouts ofJoanna Mason. The dog pattered into the kitchen, sniffed her shoes and then flopped down on the floor.

'Do you mind if I ask where Dr Hunter is?' Louise asked Neil Hunter.

'Do you mind if I ask why?' The question seemed to fluster him. He hadn't looked nervous when she talked about the fire but he looked downright jittery at the mention ofhis wife. Interesting. With an impatient sigh he said, 'She's gone down to Yorkshire, an aunt of hers was taken ill. What's Jo got to do with any of this?'

'Nothing. I was here yesterday, didn't she tell you? I came to tell her about Andrew Decker's release.'

'That,' he said with a grimace. 'He's out?'

'Yes, that, I'm afraid. She didn't tell you?'Wasn't that what marriage was for? The sharing ofyour deepest, darkest secrets? Perhaps she had more in common with Joanna Hunter than she had first thought.

'The news of his release has been leaked to the press, I wanted to warn Dr Hunter that the past was about to be dredged up again. She really didn't say anything?'

'She was in a hurry to get away. Happy coincidence, I suppose, if she's in Yorkshire she might be able to avoid the stushie.'

'I don't think Yorkshire's a no-go area for the press,' Louise said. 'But I suppose it might throw them off the scent.' Unless they came looking for the aunt, of course. 'An aunt by marriage or by blood?' she asked. 'On the mother's side or the father's?'

'Is that relevant in some way?'

Louise shrugged. 'Just curious.'

'Her father's sister, Agnes Barker. Happy?'

'Cheers,' Louise said. She grinned at him. He had 'liar' written all the way through him, like a stick of rock. 'She did say something about escaping for a bit.'

Neil Hunter seemed suddenly tired and he gestured to her to take a seat at the table and said, 'Coffee?', pouring beans into a hopper in an expensive espresso machine that did the whole process from grinding the beans to steaming the milk, looked as if it would grow the beans as well if you asked it nicely. The smell was too good to resist, Louise would sooner give up an arm than coffee in the morning. That was an unfortunate thought. She had a flashback to last night, picking up an arm from the track and searching desperately for the owner. A small arm.

'Where in Yorkshire?'

'Hawes,' Neil Hunter said.

'Whores?'

'H-a-w-e-s. In the Dales.'

Joanna hadn't mentioned an aunt when Louise met her last week (although why should she?). Perhaps he was right, the aunt's illness had happened serendipitously at just the right time for her escape. A very handy aunt.

'So .. .' Louise said brightly, 'can you think of anyone who might have wanted to burn down your property, someone with a grudge against you, perhaps?'

'Plenty people I've pissed off in my time,' Neil Hunter said.

'Perhaps you could draw up a list for us?'

'You're joking?'

'No. We're also going to need all your accounts, business and personal. And your insurance policies as well.' 'You think I burned it down for the insurance money,' he said wearily, a statement rather than a question.

'Did you?'

'Do you think I'd tell you if I had?'

'Someone will be back later this morning with a warrant for your documentation,' Louise said. 'It's not going to be a problem for you, is it? The documentation?' She liked it when guys like Neil Hunter got stroppy with her because at the end of the day she was police and they weren't. Hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades, warrant. Trumps.

'No,' he said. 'Nae problem, doll.' Ironically self-referential Glaswegians, what were they like? The phone rang and Neil Hunter stared at it as if he'd never seen one before.

'Problem, doll?' Louise said.

He snatched up the phone just as it went to the answer machine and said, 'Do you mind if I take this?' and without waiting for her to answer left the room with the phone. Before he closed the door she caught a glimpse of the living room across the hall. She could see the winter honeysuckle and Christmas box still in the blue-and-white jug. From here they looked dead.

She took her coffee over to Joanna Hunter's noticeboard and studied it. She had looked at it the last time she was here and afterwards had driven out to Office World at Hermiston Gate and bought one for their own kitchen but she had been unable to think of anything that she wanted to put on it.

On Joanna Hunter's noticeboard there were a lot ofpictures of the baby and the dog but only one of Neil Hunter, taken with Joanna Hunter on holiday. They both looked much younger and more carefree than they did now. There was one of Joanna Hunter (Mason then) in her teens, in athletics gear, breasting a finishing tape and one of her taking part in the London Marathon, looking in better shape than Louise could ever hope to in those circumstances. There was also a photograph ofJoanna Hunter, the Edinburgh medical student, holding aloft a trophy with a triumphant grin, surrounded by others in the same rig-out. They were all wearing team sweatshirts with the initials 'EURC', familiar letters but Louise couldn't think what they stood for. Edinburgh University something. Louise had done her English degree at Edinburgh, four years ahead of Joanna Hunter.

Class of '85. A lifetime ago. Several lifetimes.

The noticeboard seemed a very public way of recording your life. Perhaps it was her way of countering the hundreds of images of her and her family that had, for a briefperiod, flooded the media. This is my life, it said, this is me. No longer a victim. Was her heart, her secret self, kept upstairs, shut away in a drawer? Three children and a mother in black and white.

Of course. 'EURC'. Edinburgh University Rifle Club. When she was at university Louise had gone on a date (a refined term for what happened) with a guy who had been in the EURC. 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.

When Neil Hunter came back into the kitchen he looked rattled. His skin had acquired a sickly sheen and Louise wondered if he was an alcoholic.

'Another coffee?' he offered with a resigned expression on his face but then with a sudden, unexpected attempt at bonhomie he said, 'Or do you fancy a wee dram?' That was Weegies for you, morose one minute, too friendly the next. The cheerfulness was clearly false, he looked pale to the point of passing out. You had to wonder how a phone call could have that effect on someone.

'It's half past nine in the morning,' Louise said when Neil Hunter produced two glasses and a bottle of Laphroaig from a cupboard.

'There you go then, it's almost the night before,' he said, pouring himself a generous two fingers ofwhisky. He held the bottle and looked at her enquiringly. 'Come on,join a lonely guy in the hair of a dog.'

The Famous Reggie ON HER WAY UP TO THE FLAT REGGIE STOPPED OFF AT MR HUSSAIN'S on the corner of her street. Everyone called it 'the Paki shop', racism so casual it sounded like affection. Mr Hussain would patiently explain to anyone who would listen (which wasn't many) that he was actually a Bangladeshi. 'A country in turmoil,' he once said gloomily to Reggie.

'This one too,' Reggie said.

Reggie thought about the handsome young Asian policeman and wondered if he was Bangladeshi too. He had beautiful skin, completely unblemished, like a child's, like Dr Hunter's baby. Dr Hunter should have taken Reggie with her. She could have looked after the baby while Dr Hunter looked after the so-called aunt.

'What's her name?' she had asked Mr Hunter.

'What's whose name?' Mr Hunter said testily.

'The aunt's name,' Reggie said.

There was a beat of hesitation before Mr Hunter said, 'Agnes.'

'Auntie Agnes?'

'Yes.'

'Or Aunt Agnes?'

'Does it matter?' Mr Hunter said.

'It might matter to the aunt.'