When Will There Be Good News? (16 page)

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 the
m 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: sh
e
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 he
r
house all day, growing pale, only venturing out to walk the childre
n
to school. She wouldn't drive them because she was convinced tha
t
David Needler would rig a device to the car and blow them al
l
up. David Needler had been a quantity surveyor and had no apparen
t
knowledge of explosives but Louise supposed that once paranoia ha
d
got lodged in your brain it was pretty hard to shift. On the othe
r
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 wa
s
done on the internet and she said she was 'too wound up' to pound th
e
carpet to an exercise video or sit peacefully and quilt a patchwor
k
(two amongst several suggestions from a social worker). Wheneve
r
Louise went inside the house it was immaculate so she guessed Aliso
n
did a lot of cleaning. The TV was usually on, there was no sign of an
y
books, she said she used to enjoy reading but now she couldn'
t
concentrate. Louise remembered the Needlers' house in Trinity, i
t
had been a good one, semi-detached sandstone, big garden back an
d
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
. W
hat 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
. J
ackson 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 o
f
day and night until the section of the M8 between Edinburgh an
d
Livingston was a groove in her brain. There was somethin
g
meditative about watching over Alison. One day David Needler wa
s
going to come back. And when he did Louise was going to get him.

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

Patrick had ordered a 'banquet for four' from a local Chines
e
restaurant. They'd eaten from there a few times and Louise ha
d
thought the food was OK, but beneath the long, rather bulbous nos
e
of Patrick's elder sister, Bridget, the contents of the sticky foi
l
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. Sh
e
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
. W
hen 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 tha
t
now). The new bride had hidden in a huge chest in a remote part o
f
the house where no one had thought to look for her. The lid of th
e
chest had a hidden spring and could only be opened from the outs
ide and she suffocated inside it before she'd even had her weddin
g
night. Years later they found her skeleton, dressed in all he
r
wedding finery. Buried alive -but then some relationships were lik
e
that too. Who knew, perhaps the poor bride had been better offdead.

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

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

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

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