When Will There Be Good News? (35 page)

'Why did you join the police, Marcus?'

'Oh, you know, usual reasons. Wanted to try and make a difference I suppose, help people. What about you, boss?'

'So I could hit people with a big stick.'

He laughed, an uncomplicated sound that wasn't freighted with years of cynicism. Louise tried to guess what kind of music he thought suitable for a 'road trip'. He was too young for Springsteen, too old for the Tweenies, the baby's preferred drive-time soundtrack. (Funny how she too now automatically thought ofJoanna Hunter's baby as simply 'the baby'.) Marcus was twenty-six so he still probably liked the same stuff as Archie -Snow Patrol, Kaiser Chiefs, Arctic Monkeys -but no, the BMW's music system was being polluted by James Blunt, prince of easy listening. She leaned over and with one hand grabbed the CD case and emptied it on to Marcus's lap, disgorging Corinne Bailey Rae, Norah Jones, Jack Johnson, Katie Melua. 'Jesus, Marcus,' she said. 'You're too young to die yet.'

'Boss?'

She swapped places with him at Washington services. In the shop two red-tops carried the story about Decker being missing. 'Freed Killer Flees'. Assonance and alliteration, you had to hand it to these guys.

'You kind of have to feel sorry for the guy,' Marcus said. 'After all, he's paid his dues etcetera, but he's still being punished.'

'What are you, Mother Teresa?'

'No, but he was brought to justice, he paid, should he pay fo
r
ever?'

'Yes. For ever,' Louise said. 'And then some. Don't worry,' sh
e
added, 'when you're my age you'll be hard and unfeeling too.'

'Expect I will, boss.'

'Never driven a Beamer before,' he said, getting into the driving sea
t
and adjusting it. 'Cool. Why aren't we taking a police car?'

'Because we're not on police business. Not strictly speaking. It'
s
your day off, it's my day off. We're going for a drive.'

'Quite a long one.'

'Just be careful with the car, Scout.'

'Yes, boss. Off we go. To infinity and beyond!'

He was a good driver, good enough almost for her to relax.

Almost. So, elderly aunt here we come, ready or not, Louise thought.

The impostor aunt. The farce had grown more farcical. Except i
t
wasn't funny, but then farces rarely were in Louise's opinion, she wa
s
drawn more to revenge tragedies. Patrick, surprisingly (or perhap
s
not), liked Restoration comedy. And Wagner. Should you marry
a
man who liked Wagner?

The first time a teenage Howard Mason went to a concert was to a performance of Handel's Messiah given by the Bradford Choral Society and he had wept during the 'Hallelujah Chorus'. Or was she getting him mixed up with one of his alter egos, his fictional doppelgangers?

The book he was writing in Devon, in the winter before the murders took place, was called The Brass Band Plays On and the protagonist was a struggling playwright (northern, naturally) who was hobbled by domesticity in the form of two small daughters and a wife who had made him move to the country. There was no second, fictional self for the baby Joseph, Howard Mason's baby son seemed to have escaped being pinned to the page.

After the murders Howard stopped writing his way through his life and moved to Los Angeles where he worked on a handful of screenplays for unsuccessful movies. (Where was Joanna during this time?) When his screenwriting career went nowhere Howard had hung out around a swimming pool in Laurel Canyon producing a pedestrian collection of stories centred on a Brit writer working in Hollywood. Fitzgerald it wasn't. What Howard Mason never wrote (what he never even talked about) was a novel about a man whose family was murdered while he was off dallying with his Swedish mistress. He missed an opportunity there, it would probably have been a bestseller.

She had collected three phone messages from Reggie already today. They were all agitated, one
of the
m was a car registration number (A black Nissan Pathfinder, the girl was a better witness than most) and she caught the name 'Anderson' in the middle of one particularly breathless communique. She felt a stab of guilt. Reggie's fantasies were all proving to be grounded in reality, but kidnap -really? (Kidnapped! Dr Hunter's been kidnapped.) Crazy, crazy talk.

The third message was an itemization of the contents ofJoanna Hunter's handbag which Reggie had found in her bedroom -Her driving specs, how can she have driven without them? Her inhaler. Her purse!

Louise's headache bloomed and she imagined her brain looked like an atomic explosion, the mushroom growing larger, pressing against the hard plates of her skull. She closed her eyes and pushed her fists into her eye sockets. She had an awful feeling that Reggie Chase might be right, something bad had happened to Joanna Hunter.

'Get someone to run a registration number,' she said to Marcus.

'Why exactly are we worried about this aunt, boss?' Marcus asked.

'I'm not worried about the aunt,' Louise sighed. 'I'm worried about Joanna Hunter. There are some, I don't know, anomalies.'

'And so the two of us are driving a hundred and sixty miles to knock on a door,' Marcus puzzled. 'Couldn't the local police do that?' 'Yes, they could,' she said patiently (so much more patiently tha
n
with Patrick). 'But we're doing it instead.' .

'And do you think it has anything to do with Decker possibly being up in the Edinburgh area? Or is it the dodgy husband? Like a buried-beneath-the-patio scenario?'

'Or kidnap,' Louise said. There, she'd uttered the word she'd bee
n
avoiding.

'Kidnap?'

'Well, there is no evidence that Joanna Hunter is alive and well an
d
free, is there?' Louise said.

, "Proof of life", that's what they call it in kidnap cases, isn't it?'

'I think that might be what they call it in the movies. I don't know
,
I really don't. I'm probably just being stupid, OK. I just want to b
e
sure. I would have said she's not the kind of person who runs awa
y
and hides. But that's exactly what she did once.'

'Not criticizing, boss. Just asking.'

Louise couldn't remember when she had last admitted stupidity t
o
anyone.

Marcus got a call back about Reggie's Nissan. 'Registered to
a
company in Glasgow, some kind of chauffeur company, wedding
s
and the like, although it's hard to visualize the blushing bride climbi
ng out of a Pathfinder.'

'All roads lead to Glasgow,' Louise said.

'Who was the guy who wasn't Decker, boss? In the hospital?'

'Nobody. He was nobody. Ordinary guy.'

'Discharged himself? How? Why?' When she had returned to the hospital and seen the bed stripped and the occupant missing she had immediately thought that he must be lying in the morgue somewhere, but 'Discharged? Are you sure?'

'Against medical advice,' a nurse at the ward station said disapprovingly.

'His daughter was here,' the Irish nurse said. 'He went with her.'

'His daughter?' Louise couldn't remember the name ofJackson's daughter even though they had once in the past traded parental guidance notes, but she was what -eleven, twelve? Louise couldn't remember. 'On her own?' she asked.

The nurse shrugged as ifit was a matter of indifference to her.

He had gone. Without even saying goodbye. The bastard.

It took less time than you would think to arrive in the middle of nowhere. They made it in just under three hours, 'So there,' she said to the Sat Nav.

'Break out the biscuits,' Marcus said.

Turn left at Scotch Corner and within minutes you were in a different world. A green kind ofworld. Not as green as water-sodden Ireland where they had gone on honeymoon. Louise had fancied Kerala but somehow they had ended up in Donegal. 'You can go to India on your next honeymoon,' Patrick said. How they laughed. Ha, ha, ha.

He talked about'going back to Ireland some day'. He meant when he retired and no matter how hard she tried Louise couldn't figure herself into this vision of the future.

Hawes was a small market town with a big cheese thing going on that she didn't understand until Marcus said, 'Wensleydale, boss. You know-' He made a ridiculous rubber face, baring all his teeth in a grin and said, 'Cheeese, Gromit, cheeese. Wallace and Gromit are, like, local heroes.'

'U-huh,' Louise said. Don't come between a boy and his cartoon heroes. Archie was fanatical about some American horror comic series. My two boys, Louise thought -light and dark, cherub and demon.

It was the kind of place that had everything an elderly aunt might want, big enough to have shops and doctors and dentists, a nice house with a view, 'Hillview Cottage' in fact, which did indeed have a view ofa hill, but was more ofa fifties-style bungalow than a quaint roses-round-the-door kind of dwelling. It was on the outskirts of Hawes, taking in town and country. The best if both worlds, she imagined Oliver Barker saying to his wife when they retired here. Louise wondered if she should be worried that the entire Mason clan, both real and unreal, had taken up residence in her brain.

Louise was an urbanite, she preferred the gut-thrilling sound ofan emergency siren slicing through the night to the noise of country birds at dawn. Pub brawls, rackety roadworks, mugged tourists, the badlands on a Saturday night, they all made sense, they were part of the huge, dirty, torn social fabric. There was a war raging out there in the city and she was part
of the
fight, but the countryside unsettled her because she didn't know who the enemy was. She had always preferred North and South to Wuthering Heights. All that demented running around the moors, identifYing yourself with the scenery, not a good role model for a woman.

If she was forced at gunpoint to choose where she would prefer to bury herself -Ireland or Hawes -Louise supposed she would go for Hawes. The last time she had talked properly to Jackson, rather than watching him asleep in a hospital bed, he had owned a place in France. That sounded a lot better than eitherYorkshire or Ireland to Louise but she suspected that it was the 'Jackson' rather than the 'France' part of the equation that was attractive as, presumably, rural France had more than its fair share of twittering birds and mindnumbing tranquillity. She had never been to France, never been anywhere really. Certainly never been to Kerala. Patrick had suggested next April in Paris, 'a long weekend' and she had shied away because secretly she was saving Paris for Jackson, which was clearly ridiculous. She was standing in his home county now but the Dales were not the grim and grime which formed his essence. She should stop thinking about him. This kind of obsession was exactly how you ended up plucking feathers from pillows on your deathbed.

Marcus parked the car a couple of doors down from 'Hillview'. No cars outside, no cars in the drive. No sign oflife. No proof of it at all.

'You can have the honours,' Louise said to Marcus when they got out of the car and he stepped forward and knocked smartly on the door.

'Very professionally done,' Louise said. 'You should be a policeman.'

A big, deeply unattractive man in a white wife-beater vest opened the door and stared unwelcomingly at them. She could hear a racing commentary blaring from a television somewhere in the background. He had a can of lager in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He was a formidable cliche, Louise felt like congratulating him on his near-iconic status.

'Good afternoon,' Marcus said pleasantly. 'I wonder if you could help us?' He sounded like an evangelist doorstep-selling good news and Bibles.

'Unlikely,' the missing link said. Louise couldn't tell ifhe was being insolent or just being English. Both, probably. Her warrant itched in her bag but they were in mufti, not here on official business.

'I'm looking for a Mrs Agnes Barker?' Marcus persisted pleasantly. 'Who?'The man frowned at Marcus as if he'd started speaking in tongues. 'Agnes Barker,' he repeated slowly. 'This is the address we have for her.'

'Well, you're wrong.'

Louise couldn't help herself. She pulled her warrant out and thrust it in his ugly face and said, 'Shall we try that again? From the top _. we're looking for a Mrs Agnes Barker.'

'I don't know,' he said truculently. 'I rent. I'll give you the number.'

'Thank you.'

The girl who answered the phone at the rental agency and who sounded about twelve years old readily admitted that they were handling the rental for Mrs Barker's solicitor without Louise even explaining who she was. 'They have a power of attorney for her,' she said, which Louise translated as meaning that the aunt was gaga.

'Mrs Barker is incapacitated?'

'She's in Fernlea. It's a nursing home.'

'So she does exist,' Marcus said.

Louise's phone rang as Marcus was reprogramming the Sat Nav. Abbie Nash was saying, 'Boss? Got something on the car rental, or rather got nothing. We've phoned round every car hire place in Edinburgh. None of them rented a vehicle to a Joanna Hunter.'