Текст книги "When Will There Be Good News?"

Автор книги: Kate Atkinson

Соавторы: Kate Atkinson,Kate Atkinson
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'Any of them catch fire?'

'The cafe, actually. An electrical fault.'

'And the arcade?'

'A lot of petrol splashed around inside,' Marcus said. 'Not a spurof-the-moment thing. Door was broken into at the back, all the alarms were on but by the time the fire brigade arrived at the scene the place was well alight.'

'And the word on the pavement on Mr Hunter these days?'

'Word is he's clean,' Marcus said. 'Bit of a rogue, but to all intents and purposes, a legitimate businessman.'

'So it's just the people he associates with who are dodgy?'

She had already seen the photos that the Fraud Squad had sent over, nice crisp images of Hunter sharing a variety ofbeverages over the weeks with one Michael Anderson from Glasgow, plus various hangers-on. 'His retinue,' Marcus said. 'Look at these guys, faces only a mother could love.' Anderson was suspected of drug-dealing in his home town but was so far up the food chain in his luxury penthouse that Strathclyde Police had found it hard to hang anything on him. 'Good lawyers,' Marcus said.

'Or bad lawyers, depending how you look at it.'

The Fraud officers thought that Anderson had run out of ways to clean his money in Glasgow and was looking to Edinburgh, to utilize a bit of Neil Hunter's 'this and that', as his lovely wife would have it. Dr Hunter wore the word 'wife' so much better than Louise did.

'How did you two meet?' Louise asked her yesterday, pretending to be the kind ofwoman who was interested in romantic anecdotes, who listened to Steve Wright's Sunday Love Songs while making breakfast in bed for her husband, and not some hard-nosed cow who was probably about to send a report about your husband to the Procurator Fiscal. Joanna Hunter laughed and said, 'I treated him in A and E, he asked me out to dinner.'

'And you went?' Louise couldn't quite keep the incredulity out of her voice.

'No, highly unethical.' Joanna Hunter laughed again as if the memory was part of some long-treasured amusing story (How I met your father). 'He persisted,' she said, 'and eventually I gave in.'

Me too, Louise thought but instead said, 'My mother and father met on holiday,' and Joanna Hunter said, '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.

'Why was Mr Hunter in A and E?' Louise asked.

'He'd been set upon by some thugs.'

Accident-prone, keeping bad company, all the signs there at the beginning. Why on earth would the lovely doctor go out with someone like that?

'I liked his energy,' she offered, unprompted. Dogs are energetic, Louise thought and smiled and said, 'Yes, that's what my mother said about my father.'

She didn't mention the arcade fire to Joanna Hunter, it seemed impolite given the nature of the news she had brought to her doorstep.

'Call me Jo,' she said.

'There's nothing concrete to link Hunter to any of the Glaswegian guys,' Louise said to Marcus. 'Maybe Anderson and Hunter were wee pals at primary school.'

'Well, word on the pavey also says Hunter's on the edge of going under,' Marcus said. 'Has been for a while. Going into business with Anderson might be one way of keeping afloat but then so might the insurance payout from a big fire.'

'I'll talk to him,' Louise said, picking up the file.

'Boss?'

'What? Not my job, me being such a high heid yin? He lives round the corner from me. I'll pop in on my way to work tomorrow morning.' She didn't say I'm reading my way through his father-in-law's canon. Certainly didn't say, I'm fascinated by Joanna Hunter, she's the other side ifme, the woman I never became -the good survivor, the good wife, the good mother. 'Let's apply to the Procurator Fiscal for a warrant to get our hands on Hunter's documentation.'

'Yes, boss.' He looked disappointed at having the case snatched literally from under his nose.

'I'll just talk to him,' Louise soothed, 'and then you can have him back. I have a bit of a connection, I had to go and see his wife yesterday, that's all.'

'His wife?'

'Joanna.'

DS Karen Warner came through the open door to Louise's office and dropped a pile offiles on her desk. 'Yours, I think,' she said, resting her weight against the desk. A walking filing cabinet, eight months pregnant with her first baby and still at work. ('Going down fighting, boss.') She was older than Louise (,Elderly primigravidas how disgusting does that sound?'). Motherhood was going to be a shock to her, Louise thought. She was going to hit the wall at sixty miles an hour and wonder what happened.

Karen was still on the Needler team, halved in size now from what it had been six urgent months ago, moved back now from St Leonard's to Howdenhall and occupying a smaller incident room. Louise's superintendent had suggested it was time for her to 'move on a little' from the Needler case, to start taking on other cases. 'You're obsessed with Alison Needler,' he said.

'Yeah,' she agreed cheerfully. 'I am. It's my job to be obsessed.'

Karen unwrapped a Snickers bar and bit into it, patting her stomach. 'Licence to eat,' she said to Louise. 'Want a bit?' 'No thanks.' Louise was starving but there wasn't anything she fancied.

Marriage seemed to have affected her normally good appetite. Patrick seemed to grow healthier on it while she was fading away. She had flirted briefly with bulimia in her teens, between the selfcutting and an early bout of binge drinking (Bacardi and Coke, the thought of it now made her want to throw up) but all those things felt like an addiction of one kind or another so she had stopped. Only room for one addict in the family and her mother had had no intention of giving up her place.

Karen looked at the report on Louise's desk. 'Same Hunter?' she said. 'Neil Hunter is Joanna Hunter's husband? Wow. There's a coincidence.'

'Is Joanna Hunter a name I should know?' Marcus asked Louise.

'The one that got away,' Karen said. 'Gabrielle Mason, three kids? Thirty years ago?' Marcus shook his head. 'Sweet. You're so young,' Karen said. 'A guy killed the mother and two of her kids in a field in Devon,Joanna ran away and hid and was found later unharmed. Joanna Hunter nee Mason.' 'The man who was convicted of her murder was called Andrew Decker,' Louise said. 'He was declared fit to plead. If stabbing a mother and her two children is sane then what's the definition of insane? Makes you wonder, doesn't it? And now he's getting out -is out, in fact -and someone's leaked it. It's going to be all over the news for at least, I dunno, two hours. Feeding the empty maw of the press. I went yesterday to warn her.'

Karen crumpled up the Snickers wrapper and threw it in the bin. 'And is she still a victim, boss?' 'Good question,' Louise said.

Too late now to go to Maxwell's, she could pick up some flowers at Waitrose. She still had enough time. Just. She got into her own car, a silver 3 Series BMW that was a lot more stylish than Patrick's uber-sensible Ford Focus. He was straight as a die, right down to the car he drove.

And then her phone rang. For a beat she thought about not answering it. Her instinct, her police sixth sense, told her -yelled loudly at her -that if she answered there would be no sea bass, no twice-baked souilles.

She answered on the third ring, 'Hello?'

Sanctuary SADIE'S EARS PRICKED UP. THE DOG ALWAYS HEARD DR HUNTER'S CAR long before Reggie did. The dog's excitement was expressed in the merest quiver of her tail but Reggie knew that ifshe touched her she would find Sadie's entire body was electric with anticipation. The baby too. When he caught sight of Dr Hunter corning into the kitchen, Reggie could feel the thrill go through his solid torso as he prepared to catapult himself into the air, his little fat arms reaching out towards his mother.

'Whoa there, cowboy, steady on,' Dr Hunter laughed, catching him in her arms and giving him a big hug. Dr Hunter had brought in a blast of icy air with her. She was carrying, as usual, her expensive Mulberry bag (The Bayswater -isn't it handsome, Reggie?) that Mr Hunter had given her for her birthday in September and, draped over her arm, one of her black suits encased in a dry-cleaning bag -she had three identical suits that she rotated -one she wore, one in the wardrobe, one in the dry cleaners.

'Quelle horreur,' she said, shivering theatrically. 'Talk about the bleak midwinter. It's freezing out there.' 'Baltic,' Reggie agreed. 'The north wind doth blow and we shall have snow, and what will poor robin do then, poor thing?'

'I expect he'll sit in a barn and keep himself warm, and hide his head under his wing, poor thing, Dr H.'

'Has everything been all right here, Reggie?'

'Totally, Dr H.'

'How's my treasure?' Dr Hunter asked, nuzzling the baby's neck ('He's edible, don't you think?') and Reggie felt something seize in her heart, a little convulsion of pain, and she wasn't sure why exactly except that she thought it was sad (very sad indeed) that no one could remember being a baby. What Reggie wouldn't have given to have been a baby, wrapped in Mum's arms again. Or Dr Hunter's arms, for that matter. Anyone's arms really. Not Billy's obviously.

'It's so sad he won't remember this,' she said to Dr Hunter. (Was Dr Hunter's sadness catching in some way?) 'Sometimes it's good to forget,' Dr Hunter said. 'As I went to Bonner I met a pig without a wig, upon my word and honour.'

Reggie's mother had been a hugger and kisser. Before Gary, and before the Man-Who-Came-Before-Gary, they would sit on the sofa in the evenings, cuddled up, watching television, eating crisps or a takeaway. Reggie liked to put her arm round Mum's waist and feel the comfortable roll offat that girdled her middle and her squashy tummy. ('My jelly belly', she used to call it.) That was it -Reggie's fondest memories were of watching ER and eating a chicken chow mein and feeling her mother's spare tyre. It was a bit crap really, ifyou thought about it. You would hope two lives entwined would add up to more. Reggie imagined that Dr Hunter and her son would make amazing memories for themselves, they would canoe down the Amazon and climb up the Alps and go to the opera in Covent Garden and see Shakespeare at Stratford and spend spring in Paris and New Year in Vienna and Dr Hunter wouldn't leave behind an album of photos in which she didn't look anything like herself. It was funny to think of the baby growing up into a boy and then a man. He was just a baby.

'My own little prince,' cooed Dr Hunter to the baby.

'We're all kings and queens, Dr H.,' Reggie said.

'Is Neil home yet?' 'Mr Hunter? No.'

'He's babysitting, I hope he hasn't forgotten. I'm going to Jenners with Sheila, it's their Christmas shopping night. You know -free glass ofwine, mince pie, people singing carols, all that kind of thing. Why don't you come, Reggie? Oh no, I forgot, it's Wednesday, isn't it?You have to go to your friend's.'

'Ms MacDonald isn't really my friend,' Reggie said. 'Perish the thought.'

Dr Hunter, with the baby in her arms, always saw Reggie off on the doorstep and watched her walk down the drive. Dr Hunter was trying to teach the baby to wave goodbye and moved his arm from side to side as ifhe was a ventriloquist's dummy, all the time saying (to the baby rather than Reggie), 'Bye-bye, Reggie, bye-bye.' Sadie, sitting at Dr Hunter's side, drummed her own farewells with her tail on the tiled floor of the porch.

After her mother died Reggie had tried hard to remember the last moments they had shared. Between them, with no help from the taxi driver, they had heaved her enormous, ugly suitcase into the cab, a suitcase that was stuffed with cheap skimpy tops and thin cotton trousers and the embarrassingly revealing swimming costume in a horrible orange lycra that would turn out to be the last outfit she ever wore, unless you counted the shroud she was buried in (because there was nothing in her wardrobe that seemed suitable for eternity).

Reggie couldn't remember the expression on her mother's face as she left on holiday, although she supposed it must have been hopeful. Nor could she remember the last words Mum spoke although they must, surely, have included 'goodbye'. 'Back soon,' was her usual farewell. Je reviens. Reggie saw it as the first half of something that had never been completed. She had expected the second halfto conclude with everything happening the same only in reverse, vale atque ave, Mum at the airport, Mum on the plane, Mum landing in Edinburgh, getting in a taxi, arriving at the front door, stepping out of the taxi -browner and probably plumper -and saying, 'Hello.' But it had never happened, Back soon, a promise never fulfilled. Her last words, and they were a lie.

Reggie remembered waving as the taxi pulled away from the kerb, but had her mother turned back to wave at her or had she been fussing still with her suitcase? The memory was murky, half made-up, with the missing bits filled in. Really, every time a person said goodbye 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.

Dr Hunter was framed in the porch, like a portrait, the baby reaching for her hair, the dog gazing up at her in devotion. Beneath her suit she was wearing a white T-shirt. She had on her usual lowheeled black court shoes and fine denier tights and a thin strand of pearls round her neck with matching pearl studs in her ears. And the baby, Reggie could see him too, in his little matelot suit, his thumb corking his mouth, clutching his scrap of green blanket in the same hand that he was strap-hanging on to Dr Hunter's hair with.

And then Dr Hunter turned away and went into the house.

Reggie was standing at the bus stop, reading Great Expectations, when she felt a hand grip the back of her neck and before she could even get a scream going something jabbed hard into her lower back and a voice in her ear whispered, menacingly, 'Don't make a sound, I've got a gun.'

'Aye, right,' Reggie whispered back. She groped behind her back before finally grabbing on to the 'weapon'. 'A tube of Trebor mints?' Reggie said sarcastically. '00, I'm so scared.'

'Extra strong,' Billy said with a smirky kind of grin.

'Ha, fucking ha.' Reggie never swore in Dr Hunter's house. Both Reggie and Dr Hunter (who said she 'used to swear like a trooper', something Reggie found difficult to believe) used harmless substitutes, impromptu nonsense -sugar, fizz, winkle, cups and saucers but the sight ofReggie's brother merited more than a 'Jings and help me, Bob'. Reggie sighed. If Mum had been able to have any last words for Reggie she was pretty sure they would have been, 'Look after your brother.' Reggie could remember when they were both little and Billy was still her hero and defender, someone she looked up to and relied on, someone who looked after her. She couldn't betray her memories of Billy even though Billy himself betrayed them every day.

Billy was nineteen, three years older than Reggie, so that although he didn't really remember their father he did at least have photographs of himself with him to prove that they had both existed on the planet at the same time. In most of those photos Billy was holding something from his toy arsenal -plastic swords, space guns, bows and arrows. When he was older it was airguns and pocket knives. God knows what he was into now, rocket launchers probably.

Reggie supposed he got his love of weapons from their father. Mum had some faded photographs of her soldier husband with his comrades in the desert, all of them holding their big rifles. He had smuggled home a 'souvenir', when he was on leave, a big ugly Russian handgun that Mum had kept in a box on the top shelf of her closet in the absurd bdief that Billy wouldn't find out about it. She couldn't think how to get rid of it, 'You can hardly put it out with the bins, a bairn might find it.' She couldn't hand it in to the police either, for such a law-abiding person Mum had something of an aversion to the police, not just because they were always chapping at the door about Billy but because she was from Blairgowrie, a country girl, and her father had been a bit of a poacher apparently.

It was no coincidence that Billy and the gun left home on the same day. 'Makarov,' he said proudly, waving it around and scaring the life out of Reggie. 'Don't tell Mum.'

'Jesus, Billy, we're not living in the Wild West,' Reggie said and he said, 'Yes we are.' Really, you wondered why he didn't just join the army himself, then he could get his hands on all the weapons he wanted. Money for something and the guns for free.

Billy being in such close proximity to Dr Hunter's house made her uncomfortable. He had turned up at Ms MacDonald's house in Musselburgh a couple of times, offering to give her a lift home. (He always had a car. Always a different one.) Ms MacDonald invited him in but only because she wanted to press religion on him and get him to fix a blocked U-bend. Billy was so not the person to ask to do DIY, even though a lot of its accoutrements (new word) would have appealed to him -hammers, Stanley knives, power drills -but not in a good way. It was funny because in another life, on another path, he would have been talented at that kind of thing. He was really good with his hands, when he was still a boy, before he went all wrong, he would spend for ever meticulously gluing bits ofAirfix together and his woodwork teacher said he had a future as a joiner if he wanted. That was before he drilled holes in all the workbenches and sawed the teacher's desk in half.

Anyone who could convert Billy these days would be a real miracle worker. He had been an embarrassment to Reggie, strutting around Ms MacDonald's cluttered house, running his fingers over the dusty books as if he was a person who knew something about cleanliness, which he most certainly wasn't. Reggie hadn't liked the sly look on her brother's face, she recognized it all too well. When he was little it meant mischief, now he was bigger it meant trouble.

Reggie worried that one day Billy would drive by Dr Hunter's house and offer Reggie a lift home and she would have to introduce him to Dr Hunter. She could just imagine how his pinched, ferrety features would light up at the sight of all the lovely things in the Hunters' home. Or, even worse, that he would have reacted in the same way to Dr Hunter herself. Reggie thought she would have to deny him (He's not my brother. I don't know who he is.). 'Flesh and blood,' she could hear Mum saying. Rotten flesh.

'What are you doing here, Billy?'

'This and that,' he shrugged. (That was Billy, this and that, something and nothing.) 'It's a free country, isn't it. Last time I checked I didn't need a passport for south-west Edinburgh.'

'I don't trust you, Billy.'

'Whatever.'

'Quidquid.' Ha.

'What?'

When the bus came, Billy made a performance of helping her on to it as if he was a footman helping a princess into a carriage, doffing an imaginary hat and saying, 'See ya, wouldn't wanna be ya,' before strolling off up the street.

Hark! Hark! The dogs do bark, the beggars are coming to town.

To Brig OJ Dread Thou Com 5t At Last JACKSON EVENTUALLY FOUND HIMSELF CRAMMED INTO A LATErunning and over-subscribed cattle truck of a train that buzzed and hummed with exhaustion. The buffet couldn't make hot drinks and the heating had failed so some people looked as if they might soon be dying from hypothermia. Bags and suitcases blocked the aisles and anyone wanting to move about the carriage had to perform a slowmotion hurdle race. This obstacle course didn't prevent several small children, feral with sugar and boredom, from screaming up and down the aisle. It felt like a train returning from a war, one that had been lost not won. There were, in fact, a couple of burned-out squaddies in desert camouflage fatigues squatting on their rucksacks between the carriages. That had been Jackson once, in another lifetime.

When Jackson left the army he swore he would not do what so many had done before and go into security. Half the squaddies who had served under him could be found at the grunt end of the business -in black overcoats shivering outside the doors ofpubs and clubs. So he joined the Cambridgeshire Constabulary, he'd been a Class One Warrant Officer in the military police and it felt like a natural move. When he left the police he swore he wouldn't do what so many had done before and go into security -Marks and Spencer security guards, Tesco store detectives -half of them were guys he'd served with in the force. He left the police with the rank of detective inspector which seemed a good basis for setting himself up in a one-man private agency and he didn't need to swear anything when he gave that up, thanks to an elderly client who left him a legacy in her will.

Now, ironically, ifpeople asked him what he did, he said, 'Security,' in a cryptic, don't-ask-me-anything-else tone of voice that he'd learned in the army and perfected in the police. In Jackson's long experience 'security' covered a multitude of sins but actually it was pretty straightforward, he had a card in his wallet that said 'Jackson Brodie -Security Consultant' ('consultant', now there was a word that covered an even greater multitude of sins). He didn't need the money, he needed the self-respect. A man couldn't lie idle. Working for Bernie nught not be a righteous cause (in his heart Jackson was a crusader, not a pilgrim) but it was better than kicking his heels at home all day long.

And being in security was better than saying, 'I live off an old woman's money,' because, ofcourse, the money that his client had left him in her will had in no way been deserved and it hung as heavily on him as if he carried it in a sack on his back. He owned a money tree, it seemed, having invested most of the two million his returns grew incrementally all the time. (It was true what they said, money made money.)

What's more he'd managed, more or less, to keep to the ethical side of the street. Jackson reckoned there was enough misery in the world without it being funded by him, although he had such a big spread of alternative energy portfolios that when the oil ran out he was going to profit from the end of the-world-as-we-knowit. 'Like Midas,' Julia said. 'Everything you touch turns to gold:

In his previous life, when bad luck dogged his heels like a faithful hound and when everything he touched turned to shit, he had barely made the mortgage each month and the occasional lottery ticket was the only investment he made. And you could be sure that if he had put money into stocks and shares (laughably unlikely) the global market would have collapsed the next day. Now he couldn't give the stuff away. Well, no, that wasn't strictly true, but Jackson wasn't quite ready to go all Zen and divest himself of his worldly assets. ('Then quit whining,' his ex-wife said.)

Jackson had managed to get an uncomfortable seat at a table for four, near the end of the carriage. Next to him, at the window, was a man in a tired suit, intent on his laptop. Jackson expected the screen to be full of tables and statistics but instead there were screeds of words. Jackson looked away, numbers were impersonal things to cast an eye over but another man's words had an intimacy about them. The man's tie was loosened and he gave off a faint smell of beer and perspiration as if he'd been away from home too long. There were two women seated on the other side of the table: one was old and armed with a Catherine Cookson novel, the other, leafing indifferently through a celebrity magazine, was a fortyish blonde, buxom as an overstuffed turkey. She was wearing siren-red lipstick and a top to match that was half a size too tight and which burned like a signal fire in front ofJackson's eyes. Jackson was surprised she didn't have 'Up for It' tattooed on her forehead. The old woman looked blue with cold despite wearing a hat, gloves and scarf and a heavy winter coat. Jackson was glad of the North Face jacket that he'd donned as part of his disguise and then felt guilty and offered it to the old woman. She SHuled and shook her head as ifsomeone long ago had warned her not to speak to strangers on trains.

The suit next to him coughed, an unhealthy, phlegmy noise, and Jackson wondered if he should offer up his jacket to him as well. Strangers on a train. If there was an emergency would they help each other? (Never overestimate people.) Or would it be every woman for herself? That was the way to survive in a plane or a train, you had to ignore everyone and everything, get out at any cost, gnaw off a limb -someone else's if necessary -climb over seats, climb over people, forget anything your mother ever taught you about manners because the people who got to the exit were the people who, literally, lived to tell the tale.

The aftermath of a bad train crash was like a battlefield. Jackson knew, he'd attended one at the beginning of his career in the civilian police and it had been worse than anything he'd seen in the army.

There'd been a small child trapped in the wreckage, they could hear it calling for its mother but they couldn't even begin to get to it beneath the tons of train.

After a while the crying stopped but it continued in Jackson's dreams for months afterwards. The child -a boy -was eventually rescued, but strangely that didn't mollifY the horror of recalling its sobs (Mummy, Mummy). Of course, this was not long after Jackson himself had become a parent to Marlee, a condition that had left him torn and raw and completely at odds with his pre-natal preoccupations which had mainly revolved around choosing a pram with the kind ofmasculine attention to specs that he would normally have afforded a car (Lockable front swivel wheels? Adjustable handle height? Multi-position seat?). The mechanics of fatherhood turned out to be infinitely more primitive. He fingered the plastic bag in his pocket. A different pregnancy, a different child. His. He remembered the surge of emotion he had felt earlier in the day when he had touched Nathan's small head. Love. 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 hadn't seen Julia in her later stages. Short and sexy, he imagined that in pregnancy she would be ripely voluptuous, although she told him that she had piles and varicose veins and was 'almost spherical'. They had maintained a low-grade kind of communication with each other, he phoned her and she told him to sod off, but sometimes they spoke as though nothing had ever come between them. Yet still she maintained the baby wasn't his.

He had visited her in the hospital afterwards. Walking into the sixberth maternity ward he had taken a blow to the heart when he caught sight of her with the baby cradled in her arms. She was propped up on pillows with her wild hair loose about her shoulders, looking for all the world like a madonna -this vision spoiled only by the interloper, Mr Arty-Farty photographer, lying next to her on the bed gazing adoringly at the baby.

'Well, look at this -the unholy family,' Jackson said (because he couldn't help himself -the story of his life where shooting off his mouth to his women was concerned).

'Go away, Jackson,' Julia said placidly. 'You know this isn't a good idea.' Mr Arty-Farty, a little more pro-active, said, 'Get out of here or I'll deck you.'

'Fat chance of that, you big pansy,' Jackson said (because he couldn't help himself). The guy was pampered and unfit, Jackson liked to think that he could have taken him out with one punch.

'The better part of valour is discretion, Jackson,' Julia said, a warning note creeping into her voice. Trust Julia to be quoting at a time like this. She put her little finger in the baby's mouth and smiled down at him. A world apart. Jackson had never seen her so happy and he might have turned on his heel and left, out of deference to Julia's new-found redemption, but Mr Arty-Farty (his name was actually Jonathan Carr) said, 'There's nothing for you here, Brodie,' as if he owned this nativity scene and Jackson felt himself go so beyond reason that he would have beaten the guy up right there on the floor of the ward, with nursing mothers and newborn babies for an audience, ifJulia's baby (his baby) hadn't started crying and shamed him into retreat. Jackson had the grace to be mortified by this memory.

And now the two of them, soft southerners to the core, were living in his homeland, his heartland, while every day he walked a step further away. And Julia living a country life as a country wife beggared belief. He could believe in a billion angels dancing on a pinhead more readily than he could believe in Julia cooking on an Aga. Yes, OK, the Dales weren't part of his heritage of dirt and industrial decay, but they were within the boundaries of God's own county, which was also Jackson's own county, flowing in the stream of his blood, laid down in the limestone of his bones even though neither ofhis parents was born here. Was it in his son's DNA, carried now in Jackson's pocket? The blueprint of his child. A chain of molecules, a chain of evidence. 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.

He took his BlackBerry out and put it on the table in front of him. He was half expecting a text message. Arrived safely. As none came, he texted, 'Miss you,Jx'. That passed a minute or two. He left the phone out so that he could see if he received a reply.

The old woman opposite sighed and closed her eyes as ifthe book she was reading had quite worn her out. The woman in red -neither lady nor librarian but a good old-fashioned tart (rather like Julia) could have been the same age as his strolling woman. Where was she now? Still walking up hill and down dale? The suit took out a battered-looking packet ofcheese and onion crisps from his briefcase and in a rather reluctant act of camaraderie silently offered them around.