Текст книги "When Will There Be Good News?"

Автор книги: Kate Atkinson

Соавторы: Kate Atkinson,Kate Atkinson
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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

*

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 any more, he felt plenty old enough to die.

I cut mine arm, and with my proper blood, assure my soul to be great Lucifer's. He was going to quote himself to death ifhe wasn't careful. Jesus, his arm really was bleeding, pumping the stuff out like there was no tomorrow. There wasn't going to be a tomorrow, was there? He had finally run out of road. You're a long way from home now, Jackson, he thought.

He closed his eyes, ifhe could sleep for a minute he might be able to make it back up to the top. A nagging little voice in his head was trying to remind him that if he went to sleep now it would be the big one, the last one. He debated this idea briefly and decided he didn't mind if he never woke up again. He was surprised, he had expected to fight at the end but it was actually a relief to close his eyes. He was so tired. His thoughts ran briefly on the woman walking in the dale. He had feared for her safety when it was himself he should have been worried for.

So this was how the world ended. This ae nighte, this ae nighte, every nighte and aile, fire and fleet and candle-lighte, and Christ receive thy saule.

Or the devil. He supposed he would find out soon enough. He struggled to eradicate the enigmatic walking woman from his mind and put in its place a picture ofMarlee's face (Missing you! Love you!). He wanted her face to be the last thing he saw before he went into the black tunnel.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie SHE SHOULD HAVE GOT THE FLOWERS, SHE SHOULD HAVE GONE TO Waitrose, but here she was parked outside Alison Needler's house in Livingston. The curtains were drawn, the porch light off. No sign of life within or without now, everything calmed down again. When she heard Alison's hysterical voice on the phone Louise had expected the worst -he was back. But he wasn't, it turned out to be a false alarm, not David Needler come back to finish off his family but some innocent bystander in a baseball cap walking his dog. Not that innocent actually as the dog in question was a Japanese Tosa, according to one of the Livingston uniforms who had turned up in response to Alison Needler slamming her hand on her panic button.

The innocent bystander was arrested and taken down to the station to be charged under the Dangerous Dogs Act and the dog was carted off by a cautious vet. The squad car was already there when Louise turned up so all in all they had provided quite a circus outside Alison Needler's so-called safe house. Why not just put a big flashing neon sign on the roof saying, 'If you're looking for Alison Needler, David, she's right here'.

It wasn't the first false alarm, Alison's nerves were tuned as tight as piano wires twenty-four hours a day. Her life was a train wreck. Louise would like to introduce Alison Needler to Joanna Hunter. Alison would see that it was possible to survive with grace, that there could be life after death. But, of course, the big difference was that Andrew Decker had been caught whereas David Needler -dead or alive -was still out there somewhere. If they could find him, if they could put him away for the rest of his life then perhaps Alison Needler could start to live again. (But what did 'life' mean? In Andrew Decker's case thirty years, plenty of life left for him to live.)

I have to tell you that Andrew Decker has been released from prison.

Louise had never seen anyone go so pale so quickly and remain upright, but give Joanna Hunter her due, she held it together. Of course she must have known that he was coming up for release, that he'd already been out on licence, being prepared for his new-found freedom, because after thirty years inside, the world was going to come as a shock to him.

'He's living with his mother in Doncaster.' 'She must be old, he was an only child, wasn't he?' Joanna Hunter said. 'How sad for her.' 'He's a Category A prisoner,' Louise said. 'MAPPA will monitor his release. Keep an eye on him, make sure he is where he says he is.'

'MAPPA?'

'Multi Agency Public Protection Arrangements, bit of a mouthful, eh?'

'You don't need to apologize to me, the medical profession loves its acronyms too. I'm surprised you're telling me,' Joanna Hunter said.

'I would have thought after all this time .. .'

'Well, that's not all, I'm afraid.' Louise Monroe, always the purveyor of bad news, like some dark messenger angel. 'The press have got hold of his release, I think they're going to make a thing of it.'

, "Beastly Butcher Goes Free" -that kind of thing?'

'Exactly that kind ofthing, I'm afraid,' Louise said. 'And, of course, it's not just Decker they'll be after, they'll be wanting to know what happened to you.'

'The survivor,' Joanna Hunter said. ' "Little Girl Lost". That's what I was in the evening papers. By the morning I was "Little Girl Found".'

'Did you keep all that stuff, newspaper clippings, articles?'

Joanna Hunter laughed drily. 'I was six years old. I didn't get to keep anything.'

Really it was the job of a family liaison officer but the call had happened to get passed on to her and she realized that Joanna Hunter lived just around the corner from her, a handful of streets away in their unrelentingly middle-class ghetto where there were no council houses, no pubs, no nightlife of any kind, not much life in the day either given the huge proportion of retired and elderly. The streets were dead after eight o'clock at night and there was fat equity as far as the eye could see. Welcome to the dream. Louise felt vaguely as if she'd joined the other side without ever having been on a side to begin with. 'Rejoice in good fortune,' Patrick said, more fortune cookie than Zen.

'Just to give you a heads up,' the guy on the phone from MAPPA said. 'A recently released prisoner knew Decker was getting out and sold his story to the tabloids for twenty pieces of silver. It'll be a storm in a teacup but she should know in case they find her. They'll come looking, they're better at finding people than we are.'

Louise had been vaguely aware of the Mason case, not in detail, not the way Karen seemed to be, but as one of a catalogue -guys who attacked women and children. They were different from guys who attacked women on their own, different, too, from the expartners who jumped off cliffs and balconies with their kids, who ran exhaust pipes into their cars with the kids in the back, who suffocated them in their beds, who ran after them to the furthest corners of the house with knives and hammers and washing lines, all on the basis that if they couldn't have their kids then nobody was going to have them, but particularly not their mothers.

Those were the ones who turned up uninvited at their daughter's Unicorn Magic-themed birthday party and shot their mother-in-law in the head while she was dishing up jelly and ice-cream in the kitchen and then hunted down their sister-in-law like a deer and shot her in the head too -in front of ten screaming seven-year-old girls, one of whom was your own daughter. Three Needler children altogether, Simone, Charlotte and Cameron. Ten, seven and five. The birthday girl, Charlotte, pistol-whipped by their father when she tried to come between him and her aunt Debbie. ('Always a brave wee girl, our Charlie,' Alison said.) Debbie must have understood the moment the first shot rang out in the kitchen because she had herded the children into the conservatory at the back of the house and when David Needler raised his gun at her she was trying to shield them with her body, all ten of them. Right up to the last she was yelling at him, telling him what a bastard he was. Give a medal to Aunt Debbie.

Alison herself had been upstairs with Cameron who was throwing up in the toilet after too much sugar and excitement, when her ex rampaged through the houseful of women and girls. Alison's mother was dead on the kitchen floor, her sister, Debbie, lay dying in the conservatory, her bloody head being mopped by her own ten-yearold daughter with handfuls of Unicorn Magic napkins. David Needler tried to carry off Simone and a neighbour, one of the party mothers, fought him off. On a day when she thought the most testing thing she was going to have to do was survive two hours of hysterical seven-year-olds she ended up battling for her life after David Needler shot her point blank in the chest. She lost the fight. Three lives, three deaths, the same tally as Andrew Decker.

David Needler ran, no child as a trophy. At the first shot, Alison Needler had snatched up Cameron and hid with him in the wardrobe in her bedroom.

Andrew Decker didn't destroy his own family, he destroyed someone else's. He destroyed Howard Mason's. Men like Decker were inadequates, they were loners, maybe they just couldn't stand to see people enjoying the lives they never had. A mother and her children, wasn't that the bond at the heart of everything?

Hide or run? Louise hoped she would stand and fight. If you were on your own you could fight, if you were on your own you could run. You couldn't do either when you were with children. You could try. Gabrielle Mason had tried, her hands and arms were covered in defensive wounds where she had tried to stave offAndrew Decker's knife. She had fought to the death protecting her young. Give a medal to Gabrielle Mason.

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.

There had been flowers in a blue-and-white jug on a side-table in the Hunters' living room. No, not flowers, not cheap, thoughtless, hot-house flowers grown in Kenya, but leggy, twiggy things from the Hunters' own garden -'Winter honeysuckle and Christmas box,' Joanna Hunter said. 'They both have a lovely scent. It's so nice to have flowers in winter.' Louise feigned interest. She suspected that she was genetically incapable of growing things, that nurturing wasn't in her mitochondrial DNA. Samantha and Patrick had 'shared the gardening' in their old house. Now Louise and Patrick's small, new garden was all turfed lawn, trimmed with a few tedious perennials and shrubs. Louise wasn't really sure what a shrub was, the only time she had actually been in their garden was when they had a last-chance housewarming barbecue in the Indian summer for the great and good of the neighbourhood, including two senior policemen, a sheriff and a crime writer. That was Edinburgh for you.

The first Mrs de Winter, Samantha, had been the green-fingered type. 'Sweet peas, tomatoes, hanging baskets, she loved the garden,' Patrick said. She could identify a shrub at a hundred paces, presumably. The Good Wife.

'Lovely,' Louise said to Joanna Hunter, breathing in the scent of the winter honeysuckle. She wasn't lying, it was lovely. Joanna Hunter was lovely, her house was lovely, her baby was lovely. Everything about her life was just lovely. Apart from the whole family massacred in childhood thing.

'You can't get over something like that,' Louise had said to Patrick in bed last night. 'No, but you can try,' he said. 'Who made you the voice ofwisdom?' Louise said, but only in her head because the love of a good man wasn't something to be thrown away like a piece of paper, even Louise wasn't so blunt-headed that she couldn't see that. joanna Hunter went upstairs and came back with a photograph, black-and-white in a plain frame. She passed it silently to Louise. A woman and three children -Gabrielle,jessica,joanna,joseph. It was an arty kind of photograph ('My father took it'), a close-up, their faces crowded together, Jessica smiling self-consciously, joanna grinning happily, the baby just a baby. Gabrielle was beautiful, no arguing with that. She wasn't smiling.

'I don't keep it out,' joanna Hunter said. 'I couldn't bear to look at them every day. I take it out now and then. Put it away again.'

Howard Mason had married several times after his wife was murdered. How had the subsequent wives felt about their dead predecessor? The first wife. Gabrielle -beautiful, talented, a mother of three, and murdered into the bargain -that was an impossible act to follow. The second wife, Martina, killed herself, the third -the Chinese one (as everyone referred to her) -was divorced by Howard Mason, the fourth had some kind ofhorrible accident, fell downstairs or set herself alight, Louise couldn't remember. There was a fifth one somewhere -Latin American, who outlived him. Louise wouldn't be surprised if there was a beheading in there somewhere. You would certainly have thought twice before saying 'I do' to Howard Mason.

'My Last Duchess' -the Browning poem -came unexpectedly into her mind. The thought brought a chill with it.

As time had gone by Howard Mason had become more famous for his dead wives than for any literary talent that he possessed.

Louise had never read any ofhis novels, he was before her time. After her meeting yesterday with joanna Hunter she had looked his books up on Amazon but he seemed to be out of print. You might have thought that after the murders a certain notoriety would have boosted his sales but instead he became a kind of pariah. He might be dead and out of fashion as well as print but he continued to live on, on the internet, the ghost in the machine.

As chance would have it, on her way home she had stopped off at the Oxfam Bookshop on Morningside Road and found a secondhand copy of Howard Mason's first, most famous novel, The Shopkeeper, and had read most of it in bed last night.

'Could he write?' Patrick asked. He was reading some kind of abstruse medical journal. (Should she take more interest in his profession? He was always interested in hers.)

'Yeah, he can write, but it's of its time. It must have felt very cutting edge way back when, but it's all very, I don't know, northern.'

'Eeh ba gum?'

'More like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.'

Howard Mason was a northern grammar-school boy with an Oxford scholarship who wrote as if he'd read too much D. H. Lawrence as a teenager. The Shopkeeper, written after he graduated, was an 'acid critique' (according to the Dictionary ofLiterary Biography) ofhis dull parents and his provincial background, an autobiographical source that he always freely admitted to. To Louise, it read like a rather spiteful revenge text. There was a thin line between fact and fiction in Howard Mason's life.

The Shopkeeper was written when Howard Mason was still green, before his life became grand guignol, before he fathered three children, before he married Gabrielle Ascher, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, the last three attributes lost the minute she signed the marriage register in Gretna Green at the age of seventeen. Was Howard Mason such a terrible choice that the parents felt they had to disinherit her? What happened after she died, did joanna Mason become a rich little orphan? Questions, questions. joanna Hunter had got under Louise's skin. She had stood on the edge of the unknowable, she had been to a place that no one would choose to go to, and she had come back. It gave her a mysterious power that Louise envied.

Andrew Decker had, surprise, surprise, been a model prisoner. Helped to run the library, worked in the Braille shop, converting books to Braille, refurbished wheelchairs, all very worthy. Sometimes Louise hankered after the days when prisoners were made to walk endlessly on treadmills or turn crank handles. Paedophiles, murderers, rapists, should they really be making books? If it was up to Louise she would put the lot of them down, though obviously this was not the kind of opinion she voiced at divisional meetings. ('Have you always been a fascist?' Patrick laughed. 'Pretty much: she replied.) Andrew Decker had done his A Levels, got an OU degree in philosophy (of course), showed no sign of wishing harm on 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. David Needler was ordinary. Decker was only fifty, he might have another good twenty years left in him of being ordinary. Still, look on the bright side -he had a degree in philosophy. 'At least he served the full sentence: Joanna Hunter said. 'That's something, I suppose.' But it wasn't really, and they both knew it. 'I might go away; Joanna Hunter said. 'Escape, for a bit, just until the fuss dies down.' 'Good idea.'

In Livingston Alison Needler was under siege, staying inside her house all day, growing pale, only venturing out to walk the children to school. She wouldn't drive them because she was convinced that David Needler would rig a device to the car and blow them all up. David Needler had been a quantity surveyor and had no apparent knowledge of explosives but Louise supposed that once paranoia had got lodged in your brain it was pretty hard to shift. On the other hand, of course, who would have expected David Needler to have a gun, or know how to shoot it?

Louise didn't know what Alison did all day, all her shopping was done on the internet and she said she was 'too wound up' to pound the carpet to an exercise video or sit peacefully and quilt a patchwork (two amongst several suggestions from a social worker). Whenever Louise went inside the house it was immaculate so she guessed Alison did a lot of cleaning. The TV was usually on, there was no sign of any books, she said she used to enjoy reading but now she couldn't concentrate. Louise remembered the Needlers' house in Trinity, it had been a good one, semi-detached sandstone, big garden back and front, the front one just right for a man to immolate himself in.

Alison Needler had two locks on every window, three each on the back and front doors, plus deadbolts. She had a security system with bells and whistles, she had a panic button, a mobile dedicated to an emergency number and her kids had personal alarms hanging round their necks when they weren't locked in school.

She'd been moved to a safe house but Alison would never be safe. If Louise was Alison Needler she would get a big dog. A really, really big dog. If she was Alison Needler she would change her name, dye her hair, move far away, to the Highlands, to England, France, the North Pole. She wouldn't be in a safe house in Livingston, waiting for the big, bad wolf to come and blow it all away.

Louise thought that perhaps she should station a car outside the house for the duration of the festive season. If David Needler was ever going to come back then Christmas seemed a likely time, season of goodwill and all that. Louise hoped he would, she would have liked to get an IRV over here, rouse the Gold Commander from his Christmas merrymaking to give the order to shoot the bastard dead.

Louise's phone rang. Patrick. He would be wondering where she was. She wondered herself. Louise checked her watch. Christ, six 0'clock. So much for twice-baked souffles, it was going to have to be an omelette for the in-laws.

'Louise?'

'Yes.'To her own ears she sounded efficient, maybe just this side of snappy. What she should be saying is I'm incredibly sorry, I'm letting you down, etcetera, but the give-and-take, the push-and-pull, the compromise and negotiation of a partnership just didn't seem to be in her. It felt like she'd been doing it all her life with Archie, she couldn't start again with a grown man. Patrick genuinely didn't seem to mind but you could bet your bottom dollar that he would one day.

She should have got the flowers. They would have made it look as if she cared. She did care. Possibly not quite enough.

'I'm on my way home; she said. 'Sorry.'

'Aren't you off-duty now?' he said mildly.

'Something came up.'

'Where are you?You're in Livingston, aren't you? You're sitting in your car outside that woman's house, aren't you? You're obsessed, sweetheart.'

'No, I'm not.' She was, but hey. 'And her name's Alison, not "that woman. " , 'Sorry. He's long gone, you know. Needler's not coming back.'

'Yes he is. Want to take a bet?'

'I'm not a betting man.'

'You're Irish, of course you are. Anyway I'll be home soon. Sorry,' she added again for good measure. They seemed to spend a lot of time apologizing to each other. Maybe that was a good thing, showed they had manners.

Alison Needler's curtain opened a few inches and her face appeared, pale and disembodied, cigarette smoke curling around her head like an aura. She didn't use to smoke around the kids, once she never smoked at all, once she'd had a normal kind of life, part-time admin assistant at Napier, three kids, husband, nice house in Trinity, not this tired grey pebble-dash with rubbish in the neighbouring garden. Not really normal at all, of course, it just looked normal. Ordinary. The curtain closed and Alison disappeared.

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 for ever on a sunny afternoon.

At the thought of Jackson Brodie her heart gave a guilty little twitch. Bad Wife.

There was no longer a regular police presence at the Needler house. Only Louise driving out there, keeping her vigils at random times of day and night until the section of the M8 between Edinburgh and Livingston was a groove in her brain. There was something meditative about watching over Alison. One day David Needler was going to come back. And when he did Louise was going to get him.

She started the engine and Alison Needler reappeared at the window. Louise raised her hand but Alison didn't acknowledge the farewell.

Patrick had ordered a 'banquet for four' from a local Chinese restaurant. They'd eaten from there a few times and Louise had thought the food was OK, but beneath the long, rather bulbous nose of Patrick's elder sister, Bridget, the contents of the sticky foil containers looked less enticing.

Louise had been so starving on the drive home that she had almost given in to her Scottish genes and stopped to pick up a fish supper but as soon as she crossed the threshold of their house ('their house', not 'her home') she had somehow lost her appetite.

'Sorry. I was hindered,' she said to her new in-laws when she came in the door. All Louise wanted to do was strip off and stand under a hot shower but they were already seated at the table, waiting for her. She felt like a recalcitrant teenager dragging herself in late. She imagined this was how it was for Archie. She felt a tug deep inside somewhere, she wanted her son here, she wanted to put her arms round him and hold him. Not as he was now, but as he was in the past. Her little boy.

Patrick poured a glass of red wine and passed it to her. The king sits in Dunfermline toun, drinking the blude-red wine. Red wine didn't go with Chinese food, would she look boorish if she went to the kitchen and got a beer from the fridge? ('Yes' was obviously the answer to that.) Patrick filled his own glass and clinked it against hers. 'Welcome home,' he said, smiling at her.

She could see the bottom of her wine glass already.

Bridget picked at a dish of sweet-and-sour chicken with her chopsticks and took a tentative bite. The food looked even less tempting now that Patrick had decanted it into the Wedgwood china dishes that were part of his wedding service. His first wedding service, from his marriage to Samantha. The first Mrs de Winter, his Last Duchess.

Bridget must have eaten off the Wedgwood dozens of times before. Nice home-cooked food, slaved over by Samantha because she cared about making Patrick happy. ('It wasn't like that at all,' Patrick said. 'Sam was an anaesthetist. She worked almost as much as I did.')

What was she doing? She was living with a dead woman's things. Not in a dead woman's house, she wasn't that crazy. Patrick was still living in 'the family home' when they met, a really lovely house in Dick Place, the kind of house that Louise used to fantasize about living in when she was growing up in a top-floor but-and-ben tenement in Fountainbridge with her mother. Nonetheless Patrick didn't hesitate to sell the Dick Place house -for an unbelievable sum of money -and they bought a swanky new duplex flat near the Astley Ainslie Hospital. It had looked vile on the outside -wood trim and metal balconies -but on the inside it had a kind of bland corporate luxury that Louise found strangely appealing. It started out as sterile as an operating theatre but they soon filled it with all the stuff from Patrick's old house and it lost its neutrality. The first Mrs de Winter lingered on in her belongings. Patrick had offered to change everything, 'right down to the last teaspoon', and Louise said, 'Don't be silly,' even though that was exactly what she had wanted him to do, but without her having to ask for it. Marry at leisure, repent in haste.

Patrick and Samantha had nice things: the Wedgwood, the canteen of silver cutlery, the damask tablecloths, the napkin rings, the crystal glasses. Wedding-present stuff, the goods and chattels of a traditional marriage. Louise's possessions looked like a refugee's beside his, a refugee who spent a lot of time in IKEA. When she had first opened the linen chest (a linen chest -who had a linen chest? Patrick and Samantha, that was who) she had felt alarmed at the neatly starched and ironed contents that looked as if they hadn't been given an airing since Samantha last sat in the driving seat of her car.

Louise remembered a ballad or poem set in some long-ago time when a wedding had taken place in a great house and all the guests had played hide-and-seek as part of the celebrations (imagine that now). The new bride had hidden in a huge chest in a remote part of the house where no one had thought to look for her. The lid of the chest had a hidden spring and could only be opened from the outside and she suffocated inside it before she'd even had her wedding night. Years later they found her skeleton, dressed in all her wedding finery. Buried alive -but then some relationships were like that too. Who knew, perhaps the poor bride had been better offdead.

Alison Needler said her ex-husband would have kept her 'in a locked box if he could have'. 'The Mistletoe Bride', that was what it was called. If you waited long enough your memory always caught up with you. One day it wouldn't.

'Sweetheart?' Patrick was standing over her, smiling. He had opened another bottle of the wine and went round the table like a waiter, refilling the crystal glasses. He gave her shoulder a little squeeze and she returned his smile. He was far too good for her. Too nice. It made her want to behave badly, to see how far she could push him, to smash the niceness. A bit ofa problem with intimacy perhaps, Louise?

'Well, cheers again,' Patrick said when he sat down. They all chinked their glasses and the crystal rang out like a bell. Calling her home. Not this home, some other home she hadn't discovered yet.

'Cheers,' Tim said and Louise said, 'Slainte,' just to remind them that they were in her country now.

She ran her finger round the rim of the crystal. Samantha's crystal.

'Louise?'

'Mm?'

'I was just saying to Patrick,' Bridget said, 'that you must come and visit us in the summer.'

'That would be great, I've never been to Eastbourne. Are you near the beach?'

'Wimborne actually. It's not on the coast,' Bridget said. Inside Bridget's smug and well-upholstered middle-class body there might be a perfectly decent human being. Or not.

Louise knocked back the rest of the wine in her glass and searched for her own inner adult. Found her. Lost her again.