When Will There Be Good News? (45 page)

Safely Gathered In WESTMINSTER BRIDGE, AT DAWN. THERE WAS A POEM AND HE WAS relieved to find that he couldn't remember any of it. It was freezing cold
. T
he city was almost deserted in a way that you never saw it normally. This wasn't how he had expected to spend Christmas Day. On his own, on his uppers, in the Great Wen. They had planned to book something last minute to somewhere hot and relatively unChristmassy. 'I don't like Christmas too much,' Tessa said to him. 'Do you?'

'Hadn't really given it too much thought,' Jackson said.

'North Africa,' she had suggested, running her finger down his spine so that he quivered like a cat. 'A flight into Egypt. I can probably educate you. Antiquities and so forth.'

'You probably can,' he said. 'Antiquities and so forth.'

A pair ofyoung guys, still drunk from the excesses of Christmas Eve, passed by and gave him a peculiar look, perhaps because he was contemplating the Thames with an intensity that suggested he was thinking of joining himself with the icy waters. He wasn't. His brother had done that to him, he wouldn't do it to his daughter. The two young guys probably thought he was some poor schmuck with no home to go to, no family bosom to be warmly welcomed into at the festive season. They were right.

He held it in his hand. I found it in the pocket of your jacket, she said. The plastic bag with Nathan's hair. Reggie had returned a postcard to him as well, the one Marlee had sent to him from Bruges. Missing you! Love you! The postcard looked as if it had been through a war.

It was funny because he was actually missing Reggie more than he was missing Marlee. Marlee had plenty of people who cared about her but they were thin on the ground for Reggie. We're all on our own, lvIr B., that's why we have to care for each other. The Christmas spirit had got to her, he supposed. He hadn't saved her life ('Not yet,' she said), hadn't repaid the debt that had been written in his blood.

He wondered, too, about the strolling woman. Was she waking up in a bed, in a house to the sound of carols on the radio and the smell of a turkey in the oven, or was she still walking the empty roads on the high tops in the snow and the wind and the rain.

Everywhere you looked there was unfinished business and unanswered questions. He had always imagined that when you died there was a last moment when everything was cleared up for you the business finished, the questions answered, the lost things found -and you thought, 'Oh, right, I understand,' and then you were free to go into the darkness, or the light. But it had never happened when he died (Briif/y, he heard Dr Foster say), so perhaps it never would. Everything would remain a mystery. Which meant, if you thought about it, that you should try and clear everything up as much as you could while you were still alive. Find the answers, solve the mysteries, be a good detective. Be a crusader.

He had planned, originally, to take Nathan's hair for DNA analysis. Nathan who would be waking up this morning to spend Christmas in the country with Julia and Mr Arty-Farty. Jackson fingered the filthy plastic bag. He supposed the noble thing to do would be to cast it into the river, to let it go, to let Nathan go. But he wasn't feeling very noble on this cold, grey English Christmas Day. He'd lost everything. His new wife, his old wife, his money, his home. He put the bag back in his pocket.

Tessa didn't get everything. The sale of his French house was delayed and the money came into his account just before Christmas.

It wasn't the kind of sum you turned your nose up at, so 'yet again you fall on your feet,' Josie said.

Time to move on, begin again. It felt late to be making a fresh start. Jackson wondered if he was just too old a dog to learn new tricks.

He was feeling about as bad as a man can feel when he thought about finding Joanna, which was a warm sunbeam kind of thought that could cheer a man even on the darkest of days.

Not the second, bloody, time, but the first time, on that balmy night in the Devon countryside. He remembered moving his torch in a wide arc across the wheat and spotting her just in time before he stumbled over her small, still body. He thought she was dead. Within the course of one year of his life when he was twelve, he had watched his mother die in hospital, he had seen his sister's body dredged unceremoniously out of a canal, he had found his brother hanging. He was only nineteen and he knew that he couldn't bear it if
the girl was dead, that it would snap what was left of
his heart from its moorings and he would cease to be Lance Corporal Brodie of
the Prince of
Wales's Own Regiment of Yorkshire and become himself a small child alone for ever in the dark.

But then she stirred in her sleep and for a moment he was so choked he could hardly speak. Then he found his voice and stuck his hand in the air and shouted louder than he'd ever shouted in his life, or would ever shout again, 'Over here, I've found her, she's over here!'

And he lifted her up and held her as if she might break, as if she was the most precious, miraculous, astonishing child ever to walk the earth and to the first person who reached them, a police constable, he said, 'Look at that, not a scratch on her.'

And Scou
t
WAS THE NAME OF THEIR DOG. 'I COULDN'T REMEMBER FOR THE longest time,' she said. She put both hands over her heart, like bird wings, as if
she was trying to keep something inside her chest. 'Scout,' she said to Reggie. 'He was such a good dog.'

'Totally, Dr H.,' Reggie said. 'Totally.'

'Bow-wow-wow, whose dog art thou?' she said to Sadie and to the baby she said, 'A carrion crow sat on an oak, sing heigh ho, the carrion crow, fol de riddle, 101 de riddle, hi ding ho,' and to Reggie she said
,
'A little cock sparro
w
Sat on a tree
,
Looking as happ
y
As happy could be
,
Till a boy came b
y
With his bow and arrow
,
Says he, "I will shoo
t
The little cock sparrow.

His body will make m
e
A nice little stew
,
And his giblets will make m
e
A little pie too."
,
And Reggie said
,
'Says the little cock sparrow
,
"I'll be shot if I stay,"

So he clapped his wing
s
And then flew away.'

And they both clapped their hands and the baby laughed and clapped his hands too.