When Will There Be Good News? (34 page)

She turned up her collar and hunched herself into her jacket and walked away briskly, Sadie at her heels. She had no idea where she was going, she was just walking, away from the flat, away from Gorgie. It took her a moment to realize that she was being followed by a white van, which was kerb-crawling along behind her in a really creepy way. She picked up the pace, so did the van. She started running, Sadie lolloping along excitedly as if it was a game. The van accelerated too and cut her off at the next crossroad. Blondie and Ginger climbed out. They both walked with a bow-legged swagger, like apes.

They stood intimidatingly close to her, she could smell Ginger's breath, meaty, like a dog's. Close up, Blondie's skin was even worse, pitted and pocked like a barren moon.

'Are you Reggie Chase's sister, Billy?' Blondie demanded.

'VVhose sister?' Reggie asked, frowning innocently. As if she didn't know, as ifshe wasn't poor Reggie Chase, sister
of the
Artful Dodger. (As if she wasn't all the poor unwanted girls, the Florences, the Esthers, the Cecilia Jupes.)

'That wee shite Reggie Chase's sister,' Ginger said impatiently. Sadie growled at his tone ofvoice and the two men seemed to notice the dog for the first time, which was pretty slow of them considering how big she was but then they didn't look like they were at the front of the queue when brains were being handed out.

Ginger took a step back. 'She's a trained attack dog,' Reggie said hopefully. Sadie growled agam.

Blondie took a step back.

'Give your brother a message,' Ginger said. 'Tell the wee cunt tha
t
if he doesn't come up with the goods, if he doesn't give back wha
t
isn't his then-' he made a slashing motion across his throat. The pai
r
of them really did like miming weapons.

Sadie started to bark in a way that even Reggie found quite alarming and both Blondie and Ginger retreated into the van. Ginger rolled down the passenger window and said, 'Give him this,' and threw something at her. Another Loeb, a red one this time, the Aeneid, Volume One. It flew through the air, its pages fluttering, and hit Reggie square on her cheekbone before dropping and spreade
agling on its spine on the pavement.

She picked it up. Same neat hole cut into its centre. She ran a finger around the sides of the little paper coffin. Was someone hiding secrets inside Ms MacDonald's Loeb classics? All of them? Or only the ones that she needed for her A Level? The cut-out hole was the work of someone who was good with his hands. Someone who might have had a future as a joiner but instead became a street-dealer hanging around on corners, pale and shifty. He was higher up the pyramid now but Billy was someone with no sense of loyalty. Someone who would take from the hand that fed him, and hid
e
what he took in secret little boxes.

Reggie didn't mean to cry but she was so tired and so small and her face hurt where the book had hit it and the world was so full of big men telling people they were dead. Sweet little w~fe, pretty littl
e
baby.

Where did a person go when they had no one to turn to and nowhere left to run?

Jackson Leaves the Buildin
g
THERE WERE SOME METAL STAPLES IN HIS FOREHEAD THAT GAVE HIM a passing resemblance to Frankenstein's monster. His bandaged left arm was strapped to his chest in a sling that kept his hand pledged on his heart all the time, which was one way ofmaking sure that you were alive. He had a recurrent vision of the artery inside his arm rupturing and spilling his blood again. But he was no longer fettered to a hospital bed. He was free. A little groggy, very sore -some ofhis bruises could have won competitions -but basically on the road to being a fully functioning human again.

He had to get out. Jackson hated hospitals. He had spent more time in them than most people. He had watched his mother take an eternity to die in one and as a police constable he had spent nearly every Saturday night taking statements in A and E. Birth, death (the one as traumatic as the other), injury, disease -hospitals weren't healthy places to hang around in. Too many sick people. Jackson wasn't sick, he was repaired, and he wanted to go home, or at least to the place he called home now, which was the tiny but exquisite flat in Covent Garden containing the priceless jewel that was his wife, or would contain her when she stepped off the plane at Heathrow on Monday morning. Not his real home, his real home, the one he never named any more, was the dark and sooty chamber in his heart that contained his sister and his brother and, because it was an accommodating kind of space, the entire filthy history of th
e
industrial revolution. It was amazing how much dark matter yo
u
could crush inside the black hole of the heart.

WheneverJackson started to get fanciful he knew it must be tim
e
to go. 'I'm better now,' he said to Dr Foster.

'They all say that.'

'No, really. I am.'

'The clue is in the word "patient".'

'I don't need to be in hospital.'

'Yesterday you were going on about how you died and toda
y
you're ready to walk? Roll away the stone? Just like that?'

'Yes.'

'No.'

'I'm OK to leave now,' Jackson said to the boy-wizard doctor.

'Really?'

'Yes, really.'

'No, no, no, you missed the sarcastic inflexion. Listen aga
m
Really?'

Pumped-up little Potter pillock.

'I'm A-OK,'Jackson said to Australian Mike. 'I need to get out ofthis place, it's doing my head in.'

'No worries,' the Flying Doctor said.

'Does that mean I can go?'

'Knock yourself out, mate. Discharge yourself. What's stopping you?'

'I haven't got any money. Or a driving licence.' (The latter seemed more important than the former.) 'Bummer.' 'I haven't even got any clothes.'

'They're your size,' Reggie said, indicating a large Topman bag at her feet. 'I went to Topman because I've got a store card. It might not really be your style. I bought you one of everything.' She looked embarrassed. 'And three pairs of underpants.' She looked even more embarrassed. 'Boxers. I took the size from your old clothes, the nurse gave them to me. They were ruined, they had to cut them off you and anyway they were covered in blood. I've got them in a black plastic bag, you probably want to throw them away.'

'Why did they give you my clothes?' Jackson puzzled when she paused for breath.

'I said I was your daughter.'

'My daughter?'

'Sorry.'

'And you're doing this because you're responsible for me?'

'Well, actually ...' Reggie said, 'it's more of a two-way thing.'

'I knew there had to be a catch,' Jackson said. There was always a catch. Since Adam turned to Eve (or more likely the other way round) and said, 'Oh, by the way, I wondered if ...' She had another fresh bruise, on her cheek this time. What did she do when she wasn't visiting him? Karate?

'You used to be a private detective. Right?' she said.

'Amongst other things.'

'So you used to find people?'

'Sometimes. I also lost people.'

'I want to hire you.'

'No.'

'Please.'

'No. I don't do that any more.'

'I really need your help, Mr Brodie.'

No,Jackson thought, don't ask for my help. People who asked for his help always led him down paths he didn't want to tread. Paths that led to the town called Trouble. 'And so does Dr Hunter,' she went on relentlessly. 'And so does he
r
baby.'

'You're changing the rules as you go along,' Jackson said. 'First it was "you save me, I save you". Now I have to save complete strangers?'

'They're not strangers to me. I think they've been kidnapped.'

'Kidnapped?' Now she was getting really extreme.

He knew what she was going to say. Don't say it. Don't say the magic words. 'They need your help.' 'No. Absolutely not.'

'We should start with the aunt.' 'What aunt?'

Chapter
V

And Tomorrow
.

The Prodigal Wife
.

ACCORDING TO HER SAT NAV IT WAS A HUNDRED AND SIXTY-ONE miles to Hawes and should take them three hours and twenty-three minutes, 'So let's see,' Louise said combatively as she started up the engine. Marcus, riding shotgun, gave her a salute and said, 'Chocks away.' An innocent. He was handsome, polished and new, like something just out of a chrysalis. Archie would never look like that at Marcus's age. Technically, she was old enough to be Marcus's mother. If she'd been a careless schoolgirl.

She hadn't been careless, she was on the Pill by the age of fourteen. Throughout her teens she had sex with older men, she hadn't realized at the time how pervy they must have been. Then, she was flattered by their attentions, now she'd have them all arrested.

With Patrick, in their courting period, when they were exchanging all those little intimacies ofa life -favourite films and books, pets you'd had ('Paddy' and 'Bridie', needless to say, had been the keepers of a childhood menagerie of hamsters, guinea pigs, dogs, cats, tortoises and rabbits), where you'd been on holiday (pretty much nowhere in Louise's case), how you lost your virginity and who with -he told her that he met Samantha during Freshers' week at Trinity College, 'And that was it.' 'But before that?' she said and he shrugged and said, Just a couple oflocal girls at home. Nice girls.' Three. Three sexual partners until he was widowed (all nice). There'd been girlfriends after Samantha but nothing serious, nothing indecorous. 'And you?' he asked. He had no idea how sexually incontinent Louise had been in her life and she wasn't about to enlighten him. 'Oh,' she said, blowing air out of her mouth. 'A handful of guys -if that -pretty long-term relationships really. Lost my virginity at eighteen to a boy I'd been going out with for a couple ofyears.' Liar, liar, pants on fire. Louise was ever a good deceiver, she often thought that in another life she would have made an excellent conwoman. Who knows, maybe even in this life, it wasn't over yet, after all.

She should have told the truth. She should have told the truth about everything. She should have said, 'I have no idea how to love another human being unless it's by tearing them to pieces and eating them.'

'A bit of fresh country air to blow away the cobwebs,' she said to Marcus. 'Just what the doctor ordered.'

Or, on the other hand, not. 'Late again?' Patrick said when she phoned to tell him about their 'wee jaunt' (as Marcus insisted on calling it). 'Couldn't you get the local police to pay this aunt a visit?' he said. 'It seems a long way to go just to check this thing out. It's not as if it's a case, it's not official, is it? Nothing's happened.'

'I don't tell you how to do surgery, Patrick,' she snapped, 'so I would really appreciate it if you didn't instruct me in police procedure. OK?' He had taken her on thinking she would improve, get better under his patient care, must be disappointed in her by now. The rose with the worm, the bowl with the crack. Nothing the doctor can do here.

'You're pissed offwith me,' she continued, 'because I got drunk on my own last night instead ofcoming to the "theatre", aren't you?' She put a camp emphasis on 'theatre' as if it was something boring and middle-class, as if she was Archie at his adolescent worst.

'I'm not accusing you of being drunk,' Patrick said placidly, not rising to the argument. 'You're doing that yourself.' Louise wondered about killing him. Simpler than divorce and it would give her a whole new set of problems to be challenged with instead of the tediously familiar old ones. She wondered if there was a part of Howard Mason that had been relieved when his family was conv
eniently erased. Just Joanna left, a permanent marker. Much bette
r
for him if she'd been wiped out as well.

'Don't get so het up,' Patrick said. 'That Scottish chip on you
r
shoulder is getting in the way.'

'In the way of what?'

'Your better self
. Y
ou're your own worst enemy, you know.'

She bit down on the snarl that was her instinctive response an
d
muttered, 'Yeah, well, I've got a lot on my mind. Sorry,' she added.

'Sorry.'

'Me, too,' Patrick said and Louise wondered if she should rea
d
more into that statement.

They had crossed the border. Over the Tweed and under the wire. Frontier country.

'English rules apply now,' she said to Marcus.

'Wild aunt chase,' he said happily. 'Shall we have some music on, boss?' He inspected the Maria Callas compilation in the CD player and said doubtfully, 'Jings and help me Bob, boss. Not really road trip music, is it? I've got a couple of discs with me.' He raked around in the rucksack he always had with him and retrieved a CD carrying case and unzipped it. 'Be prepared,' he said. Yes, of course, he would have been a Boy Scout. The sort of boy who relished being able to tie knots and light a fire with a couple of sticks. The kind ofboy any mother would like to have. And she would bet her bottom dollar that he had joined the police because he wanted to help, to 'make a difference' .