When Will There Be Good News? (27 page)

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JACKSON FELT A PANG OF SOMETHING VERY LIKE LONELINESS. HE wanted someone he knew to know he was here. Josie, for example. (Any wife in a storm.) No, not Josie (Now what have you done, Jackson?). Julia, perhaps. She would be sympathetic (Oh, sweetie) bu
t
probably not in a way that would make him feel better.

'What time is it?'

'Six o'clock,' Nurse Fuzzy said. ('My name's actually Marian.')

'In the morning?'

'No.'

'In the evening?'

'Yes.'

He had to check, just in case there was another time ofday where six o'clock could park. Everything else had been turned upside down, why not time itself. 'Can I have the phone?'

'No
. Y
ou will rest if it kills you,' the nurse said. She was Irish. That figured, she sounded like his mother. 'Ifit's your wife you're worried about then I'm sure we'll manage to get in touch with her tomorrow. There's always a lot of confusion in the wake of an accident, so there is.'

'I know. 1 used to be a policeman,' Jackson said. 'Did you now? Then you'll do what you're told and go back to sleep.'

He wondered when the gratitude would kick in. The 'I almost died but I've been given a second chance' thing. Wasn't that what you were supposed to feel after a near-death experience? A sudden falling away of fear, a resolution to make the most of every day from now on. A new Jackson to step out of the hull of the old one and be reborn into the rest of his life. He didn't feel any of that. He felt sore and tired.

'Are you going to stand there and glare at me until 1 fall asleep?'

'Yes,' Nurse Fuzzy said. Nurse Marian Fuzzy.

He was woken by something brushing his cheek, a butterfly wing, or a kiss. More likely a kiss than a butterfly wing.

'Hello, stranger,' a familiar voice said.

'Fuzzy,' he mumbled.

He opened his eyes and she was there. Of course. He had a moment of supernatural clarity. He was with the wrong woman. He had been going the wrong way. This was the right way. The right woman.

'Hello, you,' he said. He had been mute for decades and now suddenly he'd been given a voice. 'I was thinking about you,' Jackson said. 'I just didn't know it.'

Her eyes were black pools of exhaustion. She was prettier than he remembered. She put a finger on his lips and said, 'Shh
. Y
ou had me at fuzzy.' She laughed. He wasn't sure he'd ever seen her laugh before.

Everything suddenly shifted into place.

'I love you,' he said.

Fiat Lu
x
THANK GOD, THERE WAS NO ONE SITTING AT THE DINING TABLE WHEN she came in. There was a note from Patrick instead, propped up against an arrangement ofhot-house lilies that hadn't been there this morning. She hated lilies. She was sure their perfume had been specially bred to disguise the smell ofrotting flesh, that was why they always pitched up at funerals. Eating at Lazio's biforehand, Patrick's note said. Come and join us if you get in on time. 'Beforehand' -before what?

The idea of more eating and drinking with Bridget and Tim was enough to make Louise vomit. And anyway she had eaten already. She had gone from the hospital to a drive-thru' McDonald's and picked up Happy Meals for the Needlers. The kids didn't get to go to burger joints any more, too public. They had eaten round the TV watching the DVD of Shrek the Third. Louise had picked at some fries. She hadn't been able to eat meat in days, couldn't stomach the idea of putting dead flesh inside her live flesh.

'Happy Meal,' Alison said with her thin-lipped smile, not a smile at all. 'Not had many of them.'

'Don't you have a home to go to?' Alison said halfWay through th
e
mOVIe.

'Well .. .' Louise said. Which she could see wasn't really the right answer.

*

She realized that she had left Decker's driving licence at the hospital. She had meant to bring it away with her. It had felt like evidence but she couldn't think of what exactly.

Of course she had forgotten the licence, she had forgotten everything. She had forgotten herself for a moment.

She had flashed her warrant card and got on to the wards. Access all areas. They would have to tear that warrant card out of her hands when she left the police force. Then she had walked through wards full of train crash survivors until she found him.

He wasn't dead, although he looked all broken up. An Australian doctor she spoke to said it wasn't as bad as it seemed. Louise stroked the back of his hand, there was a black bruise where the IV went in. The doctor said he had been 'out for the count' (a medical term, apparently) but was OK now.

She stayed and watched over him for a while.

When she stood up to leave she had bent down and kissed him on the cheek and he opened his eyes as if he'd been waiting for her. 'Hello, stranger,' she said and he said, 'I love you,' and she felt completely disorientated, as if she had been burled around in an eightsome reel and then let go and flung across the dance floor. She was trying to compose the right response to this declaration of his feelings when the Irish nurse swooped back in and said, 'He won't stop asking for his wife, you wouldn't have any idea how to get hold of her would you, Chief Inspector?' and the spell was broken.

When Reggie had showed her the postcard of Bruges and said, 'I don't know whether he's alive or dead,' her heart had done the kind offlip-flap offear with which it would have greeted bad news about Archie. And right in that micro-second of the mis-beat, the thought had come to her that she wouldn't have reacted that way if it had been Patrick. She had made a terrible mistake, hadn't she? She had married the wrong man. No, no, she had married the right man, it was just that she was the wrong woman.

'We've only just identified him,' the nurse said. 'We thought he was called Andrew Decker.'

, Mo?'

*

She found Sandy Mathieson covering the night shift, 'Swapped so I could go to the wee one's football.'

'Decker's driving licence turned up at the scene
of the
train crash. So presumably he's in the area, I don't see how else it could have got there. Get someone to put out an All Ports Alert for him.'

'Of all the gin joints in all the towns, etcetera, seems too much of a coincidence,' Sandy said. 'You think he was coming to find Joanna Hunter? Finish the job he started thirty years ago? Surely that only happens in TV crime shows, not real life?'

'Well if he did, he's out of luck,' Louise said. 'She's down in England. I think. I hope.' Because if she wasn't then where was she? 'Taken,' the girl said. What if the girl was right? What if something had happened to Joanna Hunter? Something bad. Again. No, the girl's paranoia had got under her skin. Joanna Hunter was with her elderly, sick aunt. End of story.

'McLellen left stuff for you on your desk,' Sandy said. 'Copies of documentation from what's his name.'

'Neil Hunter?'

'Think so.'

She checked her phone messages after she'd read the note. 'On our way to the theatre now,' Patrick's recorded voice informed her. So that was the 'beforehand'. She was sure her husband's affable Irish tones would be very soothing if you were about to be cut open by him on the operating table. My husband. The words were stones in her mouth, a noun and an adjective that belonged to someone else, not Louise. She was continually astonished at the ease with which Patrick said my wife. He'd had years of practice, of course. How did the other wife feel? The one shut in a wooden box beneath the earth in the Grange Cemetery. Ten years on she'd be a skeleton. Her car crash had been on Christmas Eve, the Mistletoe Bride.

He's been askingfor his wife. Not only had Jackson managed to get his identity muddled with a psycho killer, the bastard had got married as well.

'We'll have a drink in the bar first,' Patrick's message continued. 'If you haven't turned up by the time we go in I'll leave your ticket at the box office. See you soon, don't work too hard, love you.' The theatre? No one had mentioned the theatre. Had they? Perhaps they had discussed it this morning at breakfast after she turned off her brain when Tim was giving out his tips on how to graft roses (Make use (if the whole blade

She checked her watch, nine thirty. Far too late for the theatre now. Anyway he didn't say which theatre -the Lyceum? The King's? Obviously she was supposed to know. She checked the second message, sent on the heels of the first, 'Afterwards we're going to Bennet's Bar,join us there ifyou can.' Beforehand, afterwards, he sure was eager for her to join him. Bennet's Bar probably meant they had gone to the King's. She could make it if she tried.

She didn't. Instead, she opened a bottle of Bordeaux that was sitting on the kitchen counter and carried it through to the living room where she poured it into one of Patrick and Samantha's crystal goblets, put her feet up on the sofa, and caught a rerun of an old CSI on Living TV. She could feel the day beginning to seep out of her bones. It was like being single again. It felt good.

In CSI, Stokes was in the process of being buried alive. Louise retrieved the remains of the ice-cream from the freezer and dug into the tub. She didn't even like ice-cream but at least it didn't count as it was going into her pudding-stomach (thank you, Dr Hunter). Red wine and Cherry Garcia, a reckless combination if ever there was one. Louise could feel the hangover starting already.

Grissom was holding up his badge and shouting 'Las Vegas Crime Lab' at someone. All that had been on her desk were copies of insurance policies, no accounts, nothing to do with Neil Hunter's business at all. She liked the way Grissom walked, like a bear with a nappy on. 'Let's look at the facts,' Louise said to him. 'Neil Hunter has insurance policies, not just on his businesses but on his wife as well, worth a cool half-million.' (Not bad, all Patrick had got was a chip of glittering carbon to pay for another wife.) Half a million would go a long way to cushioning Neil Hunter's problems. They already suspected him ofdestroying a property for money, what if he was capable of disposing of his wife for the same reason? But he'd need a body to trade for the policy, wouldn't he? And a body was what there most certainly wasn't. Because Joanna Hunter u'as with a sick aunt, she reminded herself. Nothing suspicious at all except for Neil Hunter's jangled nerves and a wilfully imaginative girl.

The last time she saw Joanna Hunter, Reggie said, she was wearing a black suit and a white T-shirt and black court shoes, the uniform, in varying degrees of chic, of the professional woman the world over. Louise's own outfit. Sisters under the suit. Joanna Hunter was still wearing her suit, Reggie said. Why wouldn't she have changed? How much ofa medical emergency could an old aunt be having that you wouldn't throw on something casual to drive in. She came home from work, she saw Reggie offon the doorstep, then she went upstairs and got as far as taking off her shoes and tights and then what?

The suspect that Grissom was talking to suddenly blew himself up.

CSI was a two-parter and ended on a cliff-hanger, Stokes still buried alive and running out of air. Louise poured herself another glass of wine that was the colour of old blood.

She was woken a couple of hours later when the theatregoers returned. They spilled noisily into the living room and Louise closed her eyes again and feigned sleep.

'She's asleep,' Patrick said, without lowering his voice.

Louise heard the crystal glass chink against the empty bottle of Bordeaux as he picked them both up from the carpet. She wondered ifhe would kiss her, or cover her with a blanket, or perhaps wake her up and encourage her up to bed, but all she heard was the door closing and Bridget's heavy tread on the stair.

Of course, the right response was 'I love you too,' and it was only by the merest whisker that she had escaped saying it to Jackson.

Grave Dange
r
AND THEN NOTHING. TIME THAT WAS LOST FOR EVER IN SOME terrible dark chasm
of the
brain that Joanna never wanted to descend into again. She presumed that the missing time had been more than filled by tens, ifnot hundreds, ofpeople with jobs to do -people asking her to describe events, showing her photographs, making drawings. Question after question, gently and relentlessly probing an open wound.

The first thing she remembered afterwards was waking up one morning, alone in a strange bed, in a strange room, and being convinced that everyone else in the world was dead. The light coming through the curtains was unusual, bright and alien, and it was only when Martina entered the bedroom and pulled the curtains open and said, 'Hello, darling, look it's snowed. Isn't it lovely?' that Joanna understood that everyone was alive except for the people she cared about the most. And it was winter. The bleak midwinter.

'Why don't you come downstairs and have some breakfast with me?' Martina said, smiling encouragingly at her. 'Some oatmeal? Or some eggs? You like eggs, darling.' And so Joanna climbed obediently out of bed and allowed the rest of her life to begin.

Martina was brought up in Surrey but her mother was Swedish, from a small town near the Finnish border, and Martina carried a northern gloom in her blood. She fought it as best she could but whereas Joanna's mother's down-turned smile had signalled happiness, Martina's cheerful upturned one often meant the opposite. Martina the poet. (Bitch-cunt-whore-poet.) Martina, with her straight fair hair and broad features, her burden ofpenitence. Martina who longed for a child
of her
own and who was persuaded into two terminations by the great Howard Mason. 'My Scandinavian muse,' he called her, but not in a way that was kind.