When Will There Be Good News? (21 page)

'Is that relevant in some way?'

Louise shrugged. 'Just curious.'

'Her father's sister, Agnes Barker. Happy?'

'Cheers,' Louise said. She grinned at him. He had 'liar' written all the way through him, like a stick of rock. 'She did say something about escaping for a bit.'

Neil Hunter seemed suddenly tired and he gestured to her to take a seat at the table and said, 'Coffee?', pouring beans into a hopper in an expensive espresso machine that did the whole process from grinding the beans to steaming the milk, looked as if it would grow the beans as well if you asked it nicely. The smell was too good to resist, Louise would sooner give up an arm than coffee in the morning. That was an unfortunate thought. She had a flashback to last night, picking up an arm from the track and searching desperately for the owner. A small arm.

'Where in Yorkshire?'

'Hawes,' Neil Hunter said.

'Whores?'

'H-a-w-e-s. In the Dales.'

Joanna hadn't mentioned an aunt when Louise met her last week (although why should she?). Perhaps he was right, the aunt's illness had happened serendipitously at just the right time for her escape. A very handy aunt.

'So .. .' Louise said brightly, 'can you think of anyone who might have wanted to burn down your property, someone with a grudge against you, perhaps?'

'Plenty people I've pissed off in my time,' Neil Hunter said.

'Perhaps you could draw up a list for us?'

'You're joking?'

'No. We're also going to need all your accounts, business and personal. And your insurance policies as well.' 'You think I burned it down for the insurance money,' he said wearily, a statement rather than a question.

'Did you?'

'Do you think I'd tell you if I had?'

'Someone will be back later this morning with a warrant for your documentation,' Louise said. 'It's not going to be a problem for you, is it? The documentation?' She liked it when guys like Neil Hunter got stroppy with her because at the end
of the
day she was police and they weren't. Hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades, warrant. Trumps.

'No,' he said. 'Nae problem, doll.' Ironically self-referential Glaswegians, what were they like? The phone rang and Neil Hunter stared at it as if he'd never seen one before.

'Problem, doll?' Louise said.

He snatched up the phone just as it went to the answer machine and said, 'Do you mind if I take this?' and without waiting for her to answer left the room with the phone. Before he closed the door she caught a glimpse of the living room across the hall. She could see the winter honeysuckle and Christmas box still in the blue-and-white jug. From here they looked dead.

She took her coffee over to Joanna Hunter's noticeboard and studied it. She had looked at it the last time she was here and afterwards had driven out to Office World at Hermiston Gate and bought one for their own kitchen but she had been unable to think of anything that she wanted to put on it.

On Joanna Hunter's noticeboard there were a lot ofpictures
of the
baby and the dog but only one of Neil Hunter, taken with Joanna Hunter on holiday. They both looked much younger and more carefree than they did now. There was one of Joanna Hunter (Mason then) in her teens, in athletics gear, breasting a finishing tape and on
e
of her taking part in the London Marathon, looking in better shap
e
than Louise could ever hope to in those circumstances. There wa
s
also a photograph ofJoanna Hunter, the Edinburgh medical student
,
holding aloft a trophy with a triumphant grin, surrounded by other
s
in the same rig-out. They were all wearing team sweatshirts with th
e
initials 'EURC', familiar letters but Louise couldn't think what the
y
stood for. Edinburgh University something. Louise had done he
r
English degree at Edinburgh, four years ahead of Joanna Hunter.

Class of '85. A lifetime ago. Several lifetimes.

The noticeboard seemed a very public way of recording your life. Perhaps it was her way of countering the hundreds of images of her and her family that had, for a briefperiod, flooded the media. This is my life, it said, this is me. No longer a victim. Was her heart, her secret self, kept upstairs, shut away in a drawer? Three children and a mother in black and white.

Of course. 'EURC'. Edinburgh University Rifle Club. When she was at university Louise had gone on a date (a refined term for what happened) with a guy who had been in the EURC
. W
ho would have guessed that Joanna Hunter had once been the Annie Oakley of medical students. She could run, she could shoot. She was all ready for the next time.

When Neil Hunter came back into the kitchen he looked rattled. His skin had acquired a sickly sheen and Louise wondered if he was an alcoholic.

'Another coffee?' he offered with a resigned expression on his face but then with a sudden, unexpected attempt at bonhomie he said, 'Or do you fancy a wee dram?' That was Weegies for you, morose one minute, too friendly the next. The cheerfulness was clearly false, he looked pale to the point of passing out. You had to wonder how a phone call could have that effect on someone.

'It's half past nine in the morning,' Louise said when Neil Hunter produced two glasses and a bottle of Laphroaig from a cupboard.

'There you go then, it's almost the night before,' he said, pouring himself a generous two fingers ofwhisky. He held the bottle and looked at her enquiringly. 'Come on,join a lonely guy in the hair of a dog.'

The Famous Reggi
e
ON HER WAY UP TO THE FLAT REGGIE STOPPED OFF AT MR HUSSAIN'S on the corner of her street. Everyone called it 'the Paki shop', racism so casual it sounded like affection. Mr Hussain would patiently explain to anyone who would listen (which wasn't many) that he was actually a Bangladeshi. 'A country in turmoil,' he once said gloomil
y
to Reggie.

'This one too,' Reggie said.

Reggie thought about the handsome young Asian policeman and wondered if he was Bangladeshi too. He had beautiful skin, completely unblemished, like a child's, like Dr Hunter's baby. Dr Hunter should have taken Reggie with her. She could have looked after the baby while Dr Hunter looked after the so-called aunt.

'What's her name?' she had asked Mr Hunter.

'What's whose name?' Mr Hunter said testily.

'The aunt's name,' Reggie said.

There was a beat of hesitation before Mr Hunter said, 'Agnes.'

'Auntie Agnes?'

'Yes.'

'Or Aunt Agnes?'

'Does it matter?' Mr Hunter said.

'It might matter to the aunt.'

*

Reggie bought a local newspaper and a Mars bar. Mr Hussain tapped the front cover of the newspaper as he rang up the price on the till. 'Terrible,' he said.

The Evenin,,? News was making the most of the train crash, 'CARNAGE!' the headline screamed above a full-colour picture of a train carriage that was almost broken in two. Carnage from the Latin caro, carnis meaning flesh. Same root as carnival. 'The taking away of the flesh.' You couldn't really get two more different words as carnival and carnage. Everywhere -well, perhaps not everywhere, not in Bangladesh, for example, but certainly in an awful lot ofplaces -they had some kind of carnival before Lent, but in Britain all you got was pancakes. Last Shrove Tuesday had been during the dark days between Mum's death and starting to work for Dr Hunter. Reggie had still made pancakes though, sat in front ofRebus on her own and ate them all. Then was sick.

The photograph on the front page
of the
newspaper didn't convey anything about what it had been like last night, in the dark, in the rain. Or what it was like to have your hands sticky with someone else's blood or to feel that one man's life could seem like the whole world on a person's small shoulders.

'Terrible,' Reggie agreed with Mr Hussain.

When the paramedics finally came to relieve Reggie of her burden one of them put a mask on the man and bagged him while the other one ripped open his shirt and slapped paddles on to his chest. The man jerked and twitched back into life. It was so like an episode of ER that it didn't feel real.

'Well done,' one of the paramedics said to her.

'Will he be OK?'

'You gave him a chance,' he said and then they took him away and put him in a helicopter. And that was that. Reggie had lost him. Reggie sighed and picked up her paper and Mars bar. 'Well, must get on, things to do, Mr H.'

'Haven't you forgotten something?' he asked. Mr Hussain always gave Reggie Tic Tacs for free. She wasn't particularly fond of Tic Tacs, but gift horses, etcetera. He rattled a box of Tic Tacs in the air before gently underarm-bowling them to her.

'Thanks,' Reggie said, catching them in one hand.

'We make a good team,' Mr Hussain said.

'Totally.'

Last week Mr Hussain had shown her a copy of the Edinburgh property press that said the area was up and coming. 'Hot spot,' he said gloomily. Reggie's block of flats showed no sign of either up or coming. The close always smelt unpleasant and Reggie was the only one who ever cleaned the stair. The tenement was in a cul-de-sac at the bottom of which brooded an abandoned bonded warehouse, its black-barred windows as grim as anything in Dickens.

Mr Hussain said there was a rumour that Tesco's were going to knock down the bonded warehouse and build a new Tesco Metro but Reggie and Mr Hussain agreed that they would believe it when they saw it and Mr Hussain wasn't going to start worrying about the competition yet.

The door to Reggie's flat was not beautiful. Dr Hunter said that the most beautiful doors in the world were in Florence, on 'the Battistero' which was Italian for baptistry. Dr Hunter had spent six months in Rome on a school exchange when she was sixteen ('Ah, bella Roma,') and had visited 'everywhere', Verona, Firenze, Bologna, Milano. Dr Hunter pronounced Italian words properly whether it was 'Leonardo da Vinci' or 'pizza napolitana' (Dr Hunter had taken Reggie out for tea on her birthday, Reggie had chosen to go to the Pizza Express in Stockbridge). Reggie couldn't think of anything better than living in Florence for six months. Or Paris, Venice, Vienna, Granada. St Petersburg. Anywhere.

There was some random spray-painting on Reggie's front door, nothing artistic, just a boy going up and down the stair one night leaving behind him a wobbly snail-trail of red paint. The front door also had scratch marks on it as if a giant cat had tried to claw its way in (Reggie had no idea how that had happened) and also marks that looked as if someone had tried to chop their way in one night with an axe (they had, looking for Billy, naturally). None of these things was new. What was new was a note, stuck on the door with chewing gum, that read, 'Reggie Chase -you cant hide from us.' No apostrophe. She took some time reading this message and then took some time wondering why her front door wasn't locked. Perhaps the giant cat had come back. The door swung open as soon as sh
e
touched it. Had careless, infuriating Billy been here? He lived in a flat in the Inch but he often used her Gorgie address to confuse people and came by occasionally to see ifhe had any interesting mail. Sometimes he gave Reggie cash but she didn't like to ask where he had got it from. One thing was sure, he wouldn't have earned it, by any definition of the word. She always put the money in her building society account and hoped that by sitting there quietly it would clean itself up and somehow rid itself of the taint of Billy. Reggie stood on the threshold of the living room and stared. It took her brain a while to process what her eyes were looking at. The room was completely trashed. The drawers from the sideboard were pulled out and emptied on the floor, the leather sofa had been slashed, all Mum's favourite ornaments thrown around and broken, thimbles and miniature teapots scattered all over the carpet. All of Reggie's essays and notes had been emptied out of their folders and box files and her books were piled in a huge heap in the middle of the living-room carpet like a bonfire waiting to be lit. There was a funny smell, like cat pee, coming from the pile. In Mum's bedroom, drawers were upended and Mum's clothes, strewn around on the floor, had had a knife or a pair ofscissors taken to them. Something that looked like chocolate was smeared on the pink broderie-anglaise sheets. Reggie was pretty sure it wasn't chocolate. It certainly didn't smell like chocolate.

Reggie still kept her clothes in her old bedroom and it was the same story there, all her stuff tossed on the floor. There was a smell of something nasty in here too and Reggie couldn't bring herself t
o
look too closely at her clothes. In the kitchen everything had been pulled out of the cupboards, the fridge gaped open, food scattered everywhere. Cutlery was flung around, plates and cups smashed. Milk had been poured on the floor, a bottle of tomato sauce had been thrown against the wall and had left a great arterial spray of red.

In the shower room, which was just a hall cupboard that had been tiled and plumbed, the walls had been spray-painted rather ineptly with the words, 'Your dead.' Reggie felt bile rising up, making her feel nauseous. You cant hide from us. Who was 'us'? Who were these people who didn't know how to use an apostrophe? They must be looking for Billy. Billy knew a lot of ungrammatical people.