When Will There Be Good News? (31 page)

She was still surprised to wake up every morning next to a man. This man. He was a neat sleeper, curled in a foetal position all night, far over on his side of their new emperor-sized bed. Patrick understood, without her having to explain, that she needed a lot of space for her restless sleep.

He had been amused that the brooding presence ofBridget in the bedroom down the hall had made sex a complete non-starter as far as Louise was concerned. Presumably he had done it with Samantha within earshot of his sister. Louise imagined Samantha was probably docile in extremis. Patrick certainly was, giving out nothing much more than a discreet but complimentary kind ofmoan. Louise was a bit of a howler.

Sex between them was good but it didn't tear up the carpet, it wasn't ravenous. Not fornication but lovemaking. Louise had always considered that 'lovemaking' was a euphemistic kind of word for something that was an animal instinct but this was clearly not a belief shared by Patrick. The marriage bed was holy, he said, and this from a godless man, although a godless Irishman which was almost a contradiction in terms.

At first she'd thought there was a considerable charm in their civilized coupling, she'd stewed in enough sweaty, feral encounters in her time, but now she was beginning to wonder. If she ever kissed jackson it would be the end ofdecency and good manners. A pair of tigers roaring in the night. Not last night in the hospital, that had been a chaste kiss for an invalid. If they ever kissed properly they would exchange breath, they would exchange souls. Never think about one man in another man's bed, especially ifthe man in the bed is your husband. Height of bad manners, Louise. Bad wife. Very bad wife.

She watched the clock tick over to five fifty-six and slipped quietly out ofbed. Patrick didn't normally wake until seven but Bridget and Tim were early birds and Louise didn't think she could face polite conversation with either of them at this hour of the morning. Or, God forbid, another breakfast enfamille. Still, she was determined that for the rest of their visit she would bite her tongue, bite it off if necessary, and be as polite as Mrs Polite Well-Mannered. The bitch was muzzled.

She put in her contacts and peered at herself in the mirror of the en-suite. She still looked exhausted -she was exhausted -but at the same time she felt overwhelming relief at the idea that she had to go to work today and not play at being a hostess.

The memory hit her ofjackson lying in the hospital bed, beaten up and mauled, down and out for the count. He was the kind who always got back up but, of course, one day he wouldn't. Why was he always in the wrong place at the wrong time? She could imagine him saying, Maybe it was the right place at the right time. He was the most annoying person, even in her imagination.

He had looked so vulnerable lying there in that hospital bed. Th
e
king sits in Dunfermline toun, drinking the blude-red wine.

The Fisher King, sick and emasculated, the land wasting around him. Did you have to bring the king back to life to restore the land or did you have to sacrifice him? She couldn't remember. Blood Sacrifice, that was the title of Martina Appleby's anthology of poems. She wrote under her maiden name, not the ill-fated 'Mason'. Louise had googled her and come up with a brief paragraph. Howard Mason had called her 'my muse'. For a while anyway. In a barely disguised roman aclif, she became Ingegerd, 'the gloomy Scandinavian millstone around his neck, pulling him under the water'. Not a great one for inventive metaphor, our Howard. Now Martina was out of print. They were all out of print. Every single one of them. Except Joanna.

She tiptoed around the house, thought about making coffee, decided against it as being too noisy.

Hobbled by her hangover, Louise didn't quite make the great escape. Just as she was buttoning up her coat, good old Bridget wafted downstairs -in an inflammatory orange-coloured satin dressing gown -and said, 'Off to work already?' and Louise said, 'No rest for the wicked, or the police.'

'Don't worry, I'll look after Patrick,' Bridget said and Louise -inlaw to outlaw at the flick of a switch -growled, 'I'm not worried, he's fifty-two years old, he can look after himself.'The bitch was out.

The flats shared an underground garage and as Louise was emerging she almost ran over the postman, bringing a Special Delivery, another volume of Howard Mason's oeuvre that she'd found on the net. She signed for it, stuck it in the glove compartment and drove away.

This time she didn't go in the fancy front door but took the path that went along the side of the house and led to the back door. It took her past the garage, through the window of which she could see Dr Hunter's virtuous Prius, just as Reggie had said. Louise had parked on the main road on Tuesday, waiting for Joanna Hunter to come in from work. She had watched her car turn into the driveway, watched her corning home and wondered what it must be like to be the one that got away. ('Guilty,' Joanna Hunter said. 'Every day I feel guilty.')

'Me again,' Louise said cheerfully when Neil Hunter opened the door. He seemed more dishevelled in every way than yesterday.

'Do you know what time it is?'

Louise looked at her watch and said, 'Ten to seven,' like a helpful Girl Guide. Early morning -best time for rousing drug dealers, terrorists and the innocent husbands of caring GPs. Louise never even made it to being a Guider, she was kicked out of the Brownies at age seven. It was funny because she thought of herself as a good team player, although sometimes she suspected that no one else on her team did. ('Not a team player, a team leader, boss,' Karen Warner said diplomatically.)

'I said I'd be back,' she said, the queen of reason, to Neil Hunter.

'So you did.' He rubbed the stubble on his chin and stared at her absently for a moment. He didn't look in good fettle. Perhaps he was one of those men who needed a wife to keep his life ticking along (quite a lot of those about).

'I suppose you want to come in?' he said. He squashed himself against the doorpost so she had to squeeze past him. Just a little bit too close to Louise's perimeter fence. He smelled of drink and cigarettes and looked as if he'd been up all night, which was not as unattractive as it should have been. You wouldn't kick him out of your bed. If you weren't married that is, and he wasn't married, and there wasn't an outside chance that he'd somehow done away with his wife. Crazy talk, Louise.

'I noticed Dr Hunter's car is in the garage,' Louise said. 'It's dead, must be the electronics. I'm taking it in tomorrow to be fixed. Jo hired a car to go down to Yorkshire.' 'I've called Dr Hunter a couple of times, but haven't been able t
o
get an answer,' Louise said. She hadn't, but hey. 'She does have her phone with her doesn't she?'

'Yes, of course.'

'Perhaps you could give me her aunt's phone number and address.'

'Her aunt?'

'Mnl.'

He put his fingers to his temple and thought for a few seconds before saying, 'I think it's in the study,' and reluctantly leaving the room as if setting off on a particularly challenging quest.

When he'd disappeared into the innards of the house a phone, a mobile, started to ring. It was somewhere close by but the sound was mumed as if the phone was buried. Louise traced the ringing to the drawer in the big kitchen table. When she pulled the drawer open, music suddenly escaped into the air. It sounded vaguely like Bach but it was too obscure for Louise to identifY. Thanks to Patrick, she recognized a lot now but could only name a few obvious pieces Beethoven's Fifth, bits of Swan Lake, Carmina Burana -'Classic lite,' according to Patrick. He was a serious opera fan as well, he particularly liked the ones that Louise didn't. She was 'a populist', he laughed, because she only liked the big heartbreak arias. She had a Maria Callas CD, a 'Best of' compilation, in the car that she played a lot although she wasn't sure it was necessarily a healthy choice of in-car entertainment.

Her instinct was to answer the ringing phone but she could see there was something intrusive if not unethical about that. She answered it anyway.

'Jo?' a male voice, a voice that you could hear the crack and the strain in, even in the one syllable.

'No,' Louise said. A perfect little two-footed rhyme No Jo, which was the truth. Louise realized she had been looking forward to seeingJoanna Hunter, and denying the fact to herself
. J
oanna Hunter was the reason she had come here this morning, not Neil Hunter.

Whoever it was rang off immediately. If this was Joanna Hunter's phone why was it in a drawer? And who was calling her -a wrong number? A lover? A crazy patient?

She replaced the phone and closed the drawer. It was down to its last squeak of battery. Neil Hunter must have been able to hear it ringing for the last couple of days. Why hadn't he just turned it off? Perhaps he wanted to know who was phoning his wife. He came back in the room and Louise said, 'I'd like to see Dr Hunter's phone ifyou don't mind.'

'Her phone?'

'Her phone,' Louise said firmly. 'We're having a problem locating Andrew Decker, I need to find out ifhe's phoned Dr Hunter in the past few days.' She was improvising. Making it up as she went along, wasn't that what everyone did? No?

'Why would Andrew Decker do that?' Neil Hunter said. 'Surely Jo's the last person he would contact?'

'Or the first. Just want to make sure,' Louise said. She smiled encouragingly at Neil Hunter and held out her hand. 'The phone?'

'She took it with her, I told you that.'

'Only there's never an answer from Dr Hunter's mobile when I call it,' Louise said innocently (or as innocently as she could muster). She dialled a number on her own phone and held it aloft as if to demonstrate her inability to reach Joanna Hunter. A few seconds later the tinny, mumed Bach started up. Neil Hunter stared at the wooden table as ifit had just kicked up its legs and danced the cancan. Louise opened the drawer and took out the phone.

'Fancy that. Jo left it behind, can you believe?' he said. He wasn't as good at mugging innocence as Louise. 'Honest to God, my wife can be so forgetful sometimes.' (What had the girl said, Dr Hunter never forgets anything.)

'You haven't spoken to her then?'

'Who?'

'Your wife, Mr Hunter.'

'Ofcourse I have, I told you I had. I must have phoned her on the aunt's number.' He handed over a piece ofpaper with an address and phone number on it. The aunt.

'When?' Louise asked.

'Yesterday.'

'Do you mind if I take her mobile?'

'Take her mobile?'

'Yes,' she said. 'Take her mobile.'

She was parked outside Alison Needler's house drinking a takeawa
y
coffee.

Agnes Barker. The elderly aunt, like a character in a farce, not a real person at all (Enter Stage Left, 'An Elderly Aune). The aunt was seventy, not that old, not these days. Old age receded the closer you got to it. Live fast, die young, Louise used to joke, but it was hard to move fast when you were hampered by linen chests and silver napkin rings, not to mention having voluntarily shackled yourself to one man for the rest of your life. Was that what they meant by wedlock? One good man, she reminded herself.

Trawling the net, Louise had come up with some scant details about Agnes Barker -born Agnes Mary Mason in 1936, went to RADA, trod the boards in rep for a few years, married an Oliver Barker, a radio producer with the BBC, in 1965. Lived in Ealing, no children. Retired to Hawes in 1990, husband died ten years ago.

There had been a sister called Margot in The Shopkeeper -an uppity, snobbish girl -Agnes's fictional alter ego presumably. Louise was beginning to feel she could go on Mastermind and answer questions on 'The Life and Works of Howard Mason'.

Arty sister of an arty brother. In The Shopkeeper, Margot was still at school but had 'foolishly unrealistic' dreams of fame and success.

There wasn't a reason in the world to doubt either the existence of the aunt or the aunt's veracity. Except that when she examined Joanna Hunter's phone, as she was doing now, and checked it against the number that Neil Hunter had reluctantly given her for the aunt, there were no calls to or from Agnes Barker, no calls from Hawes at all. Perhaps Joanna Hunter and her husband were using the aunt as some kind ofcover, to give Joanna Hunter some space. For her escape. Long odds.

Joanna Hunter had made six calls on Wednesday and received five. On Thursday she had received -or at least the phone had received -several calls. She fished out Reggie Chase's number and, not surprisingly, most of them were from her. Any further investigation ofJoanna Hunter's phone proved impossible as the battery, on its last gasp, finally gave up on life.

She phoned Agnes Barker's home number and a politely robotic voice informed her that this number was no longer in use. She phoned the station, got hold of the handiest DC and asked him to find out when the number was disconnected. He came back in a snappy ten minutes and said, 'Last week, boss.' Disconnected and out of print. The Masons were like an illusion, all smoke and mirrors.

Louise flicked through the new Howard Mason novel, The Way Home, written a couple of years after his marriage to Gabrielle. The wife in the novel was called Francesca and had some kind of exotic parentage and a cosmopolitan upbringing, a world away from the novel's protagonist, Stephen, brought up in a claustrophobic West Yorkshire mill town -all dirty canals and soot-blackened skylines. (Louise wondered what Jackson would make of Howard's book.)