When Will There Be Good News? (40 page)

There were books allover the place. Jackson stood in the middle of the floor amongst the wreckage ofMs MacDonald's library, tensed and on his toes like a fighter ready to go into battle. She could see him thinking, weighing up possibilities and she thought, oh no, don't.

'I'm your sister, Billy,' she whispered to her brother. 'Your own flesh and blood.' Better nature, appealing, no point etcetera, but still you had to try.

'He's your brother?' Jackson said. 'You little fucker,' he said to Billy. 'It's your job to look after your sister.' 'Says you and whose Bible?' Billy said but she did feel his hold on her lessen a fraction.

'Your friends have been looking for you,' she said to him.

'What friends?' Billy said. 'I don't have any friends.' The sad thing was that he said it like he was proud of the fact.

'You told them you were called Reggie, didn't you?' Reggie said. 'Told them you lived in Gorgie. They came and threatened me, they set fire to my home.'

'Yeah, it's a funny old world, as dear old Mum would have said.'

'Don't speak about Mum like that.' Ifshe could just keep him talking he would get bored, he had the lowest boredom threshold of any human being ever, and then he would leave and then Jackson wouldn't do whatever it was he was about to do -going for Billy with his bare hands by the look of it.

And then she heard it. It was the primeval sound of a huge wolf roused from its ancient lair. The creature was standing in the doorway, its hackles raised, its fangs bared, a great growling, snarling noise in its savage chest.

Reggie had forgotten about Sadie. The dog had raced up the stairs when they first came in the house, still in pursuit of Banjo's ghostly trail.

The dog rose on its haunches and with one leap was on Billy, grabbing on to his forearm and sinking its teeth in so that Billy dropped the knife and started screaming at Reggie to get the dog off him. Reggie tried yelling, 'Down, Sadie,' but it had no effect. Then Jackson did something you wouldn't expect him to do, he punched the dog hard on the side of the head and her jaws slackened and she dropped to the floor like a sandbag. That was when things went a bit blurred for Reggie
. W
ithin a second,Jackson had Billy on the ground, kneeling on his kidneys while he shoved his good hand on the back of his neck.

Billy's arm was bleeding from the dog-bite but not in a lifethreatening way, not in a way that made Reggie want to rush to his help. Like any good first-aider she treated the most injured party first, cradling Sadie's big head in her lap and murmuring soothing words to her. Jackson got to his feet and said to Billy, 'Don't move. Not so much as a twitch.'Then he turned to Reggie and said, 'Your brother, your call. Want me to phone the police?'

They let Billy go. Gave him a second chance. Not really a second, more like a hundredth. 'Blood is blood,' Reggie said. 'After all.' Considering he used to be a policeman, Jackson didn't seem to care one way or the other. Anyone could see, he said, 'anyone except his sister perhaps', that 'Billy-boy' was hurtling at breakneck speed towards a bad end without any intervention from anyone. No, she assured him, his sister could see that too.

'What was he after anyway?' he asked and Reggie shrugged and said, 'Oh, something and nothing. This and that. You need to go to bed,' she added. 'It's been a long day.'

'Bit of an understatement,' he laughed.

High Noo
n
'YOU NEED TO GO TO BED,' REGGIE SAID TO HIM. 'IT'S BEEN A LONG day.' 'Bit of an understatement,' he said.

He couldn't sleep. The thin, damp pillow and even thinner, even damper sheets didn't help. (Who was this Ms MacDonald to have lived in such a bleak house?) He lay awake for a long time listening to Reggie moving about in the living room. He couldn't work out what she was doing but when he came down to investigate he found her putting all the books back on the shelves, like a busy little nocturnal librarian. 'Tidying up,' she said. 'I'm not keeping you awake, am I?'

He went back to bed and looked for something to read but the only thing he could find in the bedroom was an ancient copy of Latin unseen translations. He hadn't gone to the kind of school where they did Latin. After tossing and turning some more he went back down to look for some livelier reading matter and found Reggie fast asleep on the sofa with all the lights on. The dog was lying on the floor next to her and when it heard Jackson it woke up and stared intently at him. He lifted his hands in a no-threat gesture, a mime which did little to mollifY the dog who tracked Jackson with its eyes all the way round the room. You could hardly blame it for distrusting him, he'd given it a real whack to the head, but it seemed none the worse for the blow. Nonetheless Jackson felt bad about hitting it, the dog was only doing what he would have done himself, after all.

He couldn't find a readable book in the whole place. Then he forgot about reading because he caught sight of Joanna Hunter's handbag, sitting on what was probably a coffee table but it was covered in so much crap that it could have been a SecondWorld War tank and you wouldn't have been able to tell.

He was surprised that Louise hadn't taken the bag into her custody. If it had been his case he would have found it very interesting that a woman who for all intents and purposes had disappeared off the planet had left a bag full of information behind. He carefully opened the bag, watched all the time by the dog, lifted out the bulging Filofax and leafed through it until he found what he was looking for. Joanna Hunter's address.

She had been found once, she would be found again. She wasn't Joanna Hunter any more. She wasn't a GP or a wife, she wasn't Reggie's employer ('and friend'), she wasn't the woman that Louise was concerned about. She was a little girl out in the dark, dirty and stained with her mother's blood. She was a little girl who was fast asleep in the middle of a field of wheat as men and dogs streamed unknowingly towards her, lighting their way with torches and moonlight.

Later, when he was a policeman himself, he never went on a search in the countryside that carried on after nightfall and he realized that on that warm summer night in Devon all of them -squaddies, policemen, members of the public -must have entered into some unspoken communal agreement to carry on looking for Joanna Mason even when it was impossible, so great was their sense of desperation.

He covered Reggie with the tatty crocheted blanket that was on the back
of the
sofa. He was surprised at how paternal he felt towards her, he had thought he would only ever feel that way towards his own. He made a kind of farewell gesture to the dog and turned the lights out before tip-toeing down the hall to the front door.

He had his hand on the latch when a voice said, 'I hope you're not thinking of going anywhere without me.' A little, insistent voice. 'As if,' Jackson said.

There was a Nissan Pathfinder parked in the drive of the Hunters' house, behind Neil Hunter's Range Rover. 'I've seen it before,' Reggie said. 'The guys who threatened Mr Hunter were driving it.'

'And here they are again.'

'We should follow them,' Reggie said. 'When they leave. If they leave.'

'On foot?' Jackson said, 'I don't think that will work.' They had taken a taxi from Musselburgh and it had dropped them off at the end
of the
Hunters' street
. T
he place was deserted, not a light on, not a cat out.

'Well,' Reggie said, 'we can take Dr Hunter's car. It's in the garage.'

Jackson wondered if it was possible to hot-wire a Prius. Modern car technology was killing the handy criminal methods of car-starting. 'The spare keys are in the garage,' Reggie said. 'On a shelf, behind an old paint pot. Clouded Pearl.'

'What?'

'Clouded Pearl, it's the name of the colour. Dr Hunter said no one would ever look there. I'll get them.'

He held back. It was a while since he'd tailed anyone in a car. First it had been criminals, then it was adulterous spouses. Now it was big men in bad cars. Or vice versa. They had crept across the lawn and into the garage only seconds before two guys came noisily out of the house and climbed into the Nissan. Jackson had come with the intention of interrogating Hunter but he reckoned there might be a chance that the Nissan would lead them, if not to Dr Hunter, then to something or somewhere interesting. Louise had proposed three theories on the garage forecourt -revenge, murder and kidnap. He was going with kidnap. He should have kissed her. He had held back because they were both married but maybe he was using that as an excuse, maybe he was just a coward. Anyway, she would probably have hit him if he'd tried.

To drive, he removed his arm from the sling. Adrenalin was keeping the pain away, in fact he felt remarkably energetic, thanks to a fresh dose from Australian Mike's pharmaceutical cornucopia.

'Don't crash this car,' Reggie said.

The dog in the back seat gave a soft whine. 'She's happy to be back in Dr Hunter's car and at the same time sad that Dr Hunter isn't in it.'

'You speak Dog, do you?'

'Yes.'

Reggie had insisted they bring the dog. Jackson could feel its eyes boring into the back of his head and he wondered if it was planning on getting its own back on him. Reggie was reading road signs again. 'Loanhead, Roslin
,
Auchendinny, Penicuik,' she said.

'OK,' Jackson said, 'I can read.'

'Just like old times,' she said.

'You mean yesterday, which since neither ofus has slept still counts as today?' He was getting really good at this time thing now.

The road out of Edinburgh was quiet but not deserted, it was five 0'clock on a winter morning but there were already people on the move, making their grudging way through the early morning dark. A few supermarket lorries thundered along and a speeding motorcyclist hurtled past, eager to donate an organ in time for someone's Christmas, but nothing happened to stop Jackson keeping the Nissan in his sights.

It became more difficult when it turned offthe main drag
. J
ackson held back as much as he could, but he didn't know these roads and he was worried the Nissan would take an unexpected turning and be gone before he could spot it. For a while he did think he'd lost it but then he saw taillights ahead, sitting high on the road, and guessed it was his target. They turned off on to what looked like a farm road, tail lights bouncing along now. Jackson drove past the turning and then reversed back, turned off his lights and followed from afar. There had been no sign at the turning to indicate where it led to but it didn't seem like the kind ofroad that went many places.

After a couple of hundred yards he parked the car at the entrance to a field. It wasn't entirely hidden from view but it wasn't completely in the open either.

'Right,' he said to Reggie. 'You -and the dog -both stay here. I mean it, OK? I know that you are exactly the kind ofperson who will get out of this car the minute I'm out ofsight, but I'm asking you to solemnly promise to stay here. Promise?'

'Promise,' she said meekly.

He had found a hefty Maglite in Joanna Hunter's glove-box. In an emergency it was an excellent weapon and he could have done with it himself but he gave it to Reggie and said, 'If anyone comes near you, hit them with this.'

He got out
of the
Prius and listened. He heard the Nissan's engine up ahead and then the engine stopped. He set off on foot.

The Nissan was parked in front of a house, next to a nondescript Toyota, and the guys were climbing out, stiilly as if they'd had a long night. Jackson watched as one
of the
m knocked on the front door of the house before both of them went inside without waiting for an answer. After a few seconds he heard them yelling excitedly at each other as ifthey'd found something that they hadn't been expecting or hadn't found something that they had been expecting (or indeed both) and then they came racing out of the house and back into the Nissan, one of them on the phone to someone as he ran, and Jackson had only just enough time to throw himself into a dry ditch at the side of the road before they were haring back up the track towards the road. To his relief they drove straight past the Prius.

He set off in the direction of the house, wondering what it was that had alarmed them so much. Not death he hoped. There'd been enough of that for one week.

A movement in the overgrown bushes that surrounded the house startled him. He thought it might be a fox or a badger but a person, not an animal, stepped on to the path. There were enough lights on in the house to make out that it was a woman and then she was suddenly illuminated, held like a moth in the beam of the Maglite, in the unsteady hand of (a typically disobedient) Reggie and Jackson could see that it was not just a woman but a woman with a child in her arms. She was veiled in blood from top to toe and had a knife clutched in her hand. Not so much a Madonna as a great, dangerous avenging angel.

The dog barked with joy and ran towards her.

'Dr Hunter?' Jackson said, approaching cautiously.

'Can you help me?' she said to him. More of a command than a request, as if a goddess had unexpectedly found herself on earth and was in sudden need of an acolyte. And Jackson had never been one to say no, either to goddesses or to requests for help.

La Regie du Je
u
MARGARET, ARE YOU GRIEVING OVER GOLDENGROVE UNLEAVING, sumer is i-cumin in, loude sing cuckoo, there was an old lady who swallowed a fly, Adam lay ybounden bounden in a bond and miles to go before I sleep, five little bluebirds hopping by the door. Run, run Joanna run. But she couldn't run because she was tethered by the rope, like an animal. She thought ofanimals gnawing offa leg to escape from a trap and she had tried tearing at the rope with her teeth but it was made from polypropylene and she couldn't make any inroad on it.