When Will There Be Good News? (15 page)

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 t
o
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 monito
r
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 love
s
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 purveyo
r
of bad news, like some dark messenger angel. 'The press have go
t
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 wha
t
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 he
r
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.
j
oanna 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 a
t
them every day. I take it out now and then. Put it away again.'

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

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

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

Louise had never read any ofhis novels, he was before her time. Afte
r
her meeting yesterday with joanna Hunter she had looked his book
s
up on Amazon but he seemed to be out of print. You migh
t
have thought that after the murders a certain notoriety would hav
e
boosted his sales but instead he became a kind of pariah. He migh
t
be dead and out of fashion as well as print but he continued to liv
e
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.