Big Sky Read online

  He didn’t use his own name. He said he was DC Reggie Chase, because he suspected she might remember Reggie and would take that call.

  She answered after a couple of rings. Cool and efficient. “Superintendent Louise Monroe. Can I help you?” So perhaps she hadn’t clocked Reggie’s name after all.

  He realized he had no idea what he wanted to say to her or whether he really wanted to say anything. He suspected that whatever he said would be definitive somehow. This was a crossroads now and he had to make a choice. Tide in or tide out?

  “Hello?” she said. They both listened to the hollow silence, a moment of odd togetherness, and then she startled him by her powers of divination. “Jackson?” she said, almost in a whisper. “Jackson, is that you?”

  In the end, it was easier to make no choice at all. He said nothing and ended the call.

  The words of another song came into his mind. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. But so was commitment. He just wanted something simple. No strings, no complications.

  A mile or two further down the road, he made another call.

  “Mr. Private Detective,” the voice at the other end of the line purred. “You not at lovely wedding with beautiful daughter?”

  “Do you want to meet for a drink?”

  “With you?”

  “Yeah, with me.”

  “Just drink?”

  “Don’t know,” Jackson said. (Did he honestly think this was going to be uncomplicated? Who was he kidding? Himself, obviously. Tide neither in nor out, more like a tsunami.)

  “Okey-dokey. Da. Now?”

  “Tomorrow. I’ve got something to do first.”

  “Where?”

  “Dunno. Not the Malmaison.”

  “Okey-dokey. Poka.”

  A terrace of houses in Mirfield. It was not unlike the one he had been raised in. Built from gloomy millstone grit, it had an unwelcoming aspect. In the Brodie house there had been a small scullery at the back where his mother spent her time, a “posh” parlor at the front of the house with an uncomfortable sofa that was hardly ever sat on.

  And a door in the hallway that led down a steep narrow staircase to the coal cellar.

  The gray Peugeot was parked in the street outside. It belonged to someone called Graham Vesey. Forty-three years old. The number plate photographed by Nathan. Enhanced by Sam Tilling. Supplied, eventually, by a helpful woman called Miriam in the DVLA in Swansea.

  Jackson rang the doorbell. A man’s home was his castle. Always start with the polite method and work your way up to a battering ram and a giant catapult. Or just one good punch to the gut.

  He was big and sweaty and had tattoos on his bull neck and he could crush a girl like a fly if he wanted to.

  “Mr. Vesey? Mr. Graham Vesey? My name’s Jackson Brodie. Can I come in?”

  Darcy Slee

  She heard the doorbell ring and started screaming as loud as she could to get attention. When she paused for a breath she heard a lot of noise upstairs—fighting, by the sound of it. She was about to scream again when the door to the cellar opened. In the wedge of light from the open door she could see someone coming down the stairs. Darcy’s heart clenched with terror. She had been here seven days and nights, she knew what terror was.

  It was a man, but it wasn’t the man with the tattooed neck. That didn’t mean he didn’t intend her harm. He might be an even worse man, for all she knew.

  When he got to the bottom of the stairs, he crouched down to speak to her as though she was a frightened cat and he said, “It’s all right now, it’s over. My name’s Jackson Brodie. I’m a policeman.”

  The Fat Lady Sings

  The wings were crowded. Everyone seemed to want to watch Bunny take his position at the top of the bill. On the other hand, there were lacunae (Miss Dangerfield’s word, of course) made by the empty seats in the auditorium. A lot of people had only booked to see Barclay Jack, some had even demanded a refund from the Palace because of his no-show. “No-show?” the man in the box office said. “The bloke’s dead, for God’s sake. Give him a break.”

  Bunny, however, was very much alive. Resplendent in a bright-blue sequinned frock and a feathered headdress that was even bigger than the ones the chorus girls wore. One of them wolf-whistled him when he came onstage. He dipped a little curtsy to her.

  His set followed the usual pattern. He made a hash of several popular operatic arias—“L’amour est un oiseau rebelle” from Carmen and “Un bel dì vedremo” from Madame Butterfly. (“It’s an audience of philistines,” Bunny said, “but it’s stuff they might recognize.”) They were arias for women, of course, sopranos, and Bunny attacked them with screechy high notes, falling about in his heels, pretending to be drunk, pretending to be lovelorn, pretending to be a terrible singer.

  They were musical interludes—his act was basically stand-up, mainly about the travails of being a woman. The thinned-out audience responded as usual—hostility turning to tolerance and then to admiration (“T’fucker’s got balls,” Harry heard someone say), until eventually all the animosity toward Bunny had dissipated.

  This was the point at which he paused. A long pause and the audience grew completely silent, unsure, even a little nervous, of what was to come. Bunny was gazing out over them, yet he seemed to be looking inward. Had he died onstage or was he about to do something memorable, climactic?

  “Just wait,” Harry whispered to Crystal. He could already feel the hairs standing up on the back of his neck before the music was even cued. It was a good backing tape—the one thing that the Palace could boast, for no reason known to any of them, was a really great sound system.

  Harry could see Bunny taking a deep breath and then he started to sing, quietly at first as the words, about sleep, demanded, but nonetheless the audience recognized the music almost immediately. That plangent note near to the beginning seemed to reassure them. They were on home turf—it was football. And, more than that, they were in a safe pair of hands—the bloke had an amazing voice. He was flying. The audience stirred like birds and settled, they knew they were in for a treat.

  It was an aria that had become a cliché, the party piece of X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent contestants, a ubiquitous tune, but it was easily lifted out of its World Cup familiarity. All you needed was a big man with a big voice.

  Harry never failed to be moved by Bunny’s performance. Tears pricked his eyes. “Tears of happiness,” he reassured Crystal as the music started to grow.

  The recorded female chorus, coming in like an angelic counterpart, slowed everything down for a moment. But only a moment and then it was building again. Building and building. The stars trembled. There was the beautiful control of the first Vincerò and then it swelled to the next

  Vincerò

  and then stepped off into that last great elongated soaring crescendo

  Vincerò!

  Bunny raised his arms to the gods in triumph. The gods looked down on him and laughed. The stars twinkled like sequins. Everyone jumped to their feet and cheered him. They couldn’t help themselves.

  “Vincerò,” Harry said happily to Crystal. “It means ‘I will win.’”

  “And so you will, Harry,” Crystal said. “So you will.”

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank the following:

  Lt. Col. M. Keech, BEM, Royal Signals (retd.).

  Malcolm R. Dickson, QPM, formerly Assistant Inspector of Constabulary for Scotland.

  Reuben Equi.

  Russell Equi, who retains his title of God of All Things Vehicular.

  Thanks are also due to Marianne Velmans, Larry Finlay, Alison Barrow, Vicky Palmer, Martin Myers, and Kate Samano, all at Transworld. Camilla Ferrier and Jemma McDonagh at the Marsh Agency, Jodi Shields at Casarotto Ramsay, Reagan Arthur at Little, Brown (U.S.), Kristin Cochrane at Doubleday Canada, and Kim Witherspoon at Witherspoon Associates. And last but by no means least, my agent, Peter Straus.

  I have possibly slightly mangled the geogra
phy of the East Coast, mainly so that characters, especially Harry, could move about with more speed and ease than is usually the case.

  I own all mistakes, intentional or otherwise.

  My apologies to the people of Bridlington. I have nothing but happy memories of the place and would like to think that nothing bad ever happened there.

  Discover Your Next Great Read

  Get sneak peeks, book recommendations, and news about your favorite authors.

  Tap here to learn more.

  About the Author

  KATE ATKINSON is one of Britain’s foremost novelists. She won the Costa (formerly Whitbread) Book of the Year prize with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. She has written four previous best-selling literary crime novels featuring former detective Jackson Brodie, Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will There Be Good News?, and Started Early, Took My Dog, which became a BBC television series starring Jason Isaacs. She has since written three critically lauded and prizewinning novels set around World War II: Life After Life and A God in Ruins (both winners of the Costa Novel Award) and, most recently, Transcription. Big Sky is her twelfth book.

  ALSO BY KATE ATKINSON

  Behind the Scenes at the Museum

  Human Croquet

  Emotionally Weird

  Not the End of the World

  Case Histories

  One Good Turn

  When Will There Be Good News?

  Started Early, Took My Dog

  Life After Life

  A God in Ruins

  Transcription

  Song References

  Reference on here to “Don’t You Want Me” written by Jo Callis, Philip Oakey, and Philip Adrian Wright.

  Reference here to “What’s Love Got to Do with It” written by Terry Britten and Graham Lyle.

  Lyrics here from “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” written by Jimmy Kennedy.

  Lyrics here from “The Bug” written by Mark Knopfler.

  Lyrics here from “The Gambler” written by Don Schlitz.

  Lyrics here from “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” here “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive,” and here “I Don’t Care (If Tomorrow Never Comes)” by Hank Williams.

  Lyrics here from “The Blade” by Marc Beeson, Jamie Floyd, and Allen Shamblin.

  Lyrics here and here from “Wuthering Heights” written by Kate Bush.

  Reference here to “Hotel California” written by Don Felder, Don Henley, and Glenn Frey.

  Lyrics here from “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” written by Roger Waters.

  Reference here to “Holding Out for a Hero” written by Jim Steinman and Dean Pitchford.

  Lyrics here from “Hunger” written by Florence Welch, Emile Haynie, Thomas Bartlett, and Tobias Jesso Jr.

  Lyrics here from “Runnin’ Just in Case” written by Miranda Lambert and Gwen Sebastian.

  Lyrics here from “Me and Bobby McGee” written by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster.