When Will There Be Good News? Read Free Page B

hand, glaring over her shoulder. Several women -mothers and teachers -turned to look in his direction but he was studying the map, pretending indifference to anything going on around him.
    One of the mothers approached him, a bright, polite smile stuck on her face, and said, 'Can I help you?' when what she really meant was 'If you're planning on harming one of these children I will beat you to a pulp with my bare hands.'
    'Sorry,' he said, turning on the charm. He surprised even himself sometimes with the charm. 'I'm a bit lost.' Women could never believe it when a guy admitted to being lost, they immediately warmed to you. (,Twenty-five million sperm needed to fertilize an egg,' his wife used to say, 'because only one will stop to ask directions.')
    He shrugged helplessly. 'I'm looking for the waterfall?'
    'It's that way,' the woman said, pointing behind him.
    'Ah,' he said, 'I think I've been reading the map back to front. Well, thanks,' he added and strode off down the lane towards the waterfall before she could say anything else. He'd have to give it a good ten minutes. It would look too suspicious ifhe went straight back to the Discovery.

*
    It was pretty at the waterfall. The limestone and the moss. The trees were black and skeletal and the water, brown and peaty, looked as if it was in spate, but maybe it always looked like that. They called the waterfall a 'force' around here, which was a good word for it. An unstoppable force. Water always found a way, it beat everything in the end. Paper, scissors, rock, water. May the force be with you. He checked his expensive watch again. He wished he still smoked. He wouldn't mind a drink. If you didn't smoke and you didn't drink then standing by a waterfall for ten minutes with nothing to do was something that could really get to you because all you were left with were your thoughts.
    He searched in his pocket for the plastic bag he'd brought with him. Carefully, he dropped the hair into it and closed it with a plastic clip and pushed it into the pocket of his jacket. He had been clutching the thin black filament in his hand ever since he plucked it from the boy's head. Job done.
    Ten minutes up. He walked quickly back to the mud-caked Discovery. If he didn't hit any problems he'd be in Northallerton in an hour and back on the train to London. He jettisoned the OS map, left it on a bench, an unlooked-for gift for someone who thought walking was the way to go. Then Jackson Brodie climbed back in his vehicle and started the engine. There was only one place he wanted to be. Home. He was out of here. n eurotic would that make you? Especially in a time before firelighters.
    They had done an unseen translation together of some of Pliny's letters. 'Pliny the Younger,' Ms MacDonald always emphasized as if it was of crucial importance that you got your Plinys right, when in fact there was probably hardly anyone left on earth who gave a monkey's about which was the elder and which was the younger. Who gave a monkey's about them, period.
    Still, it was good to think that Billy was willing to do things for her even if they were nearly always illegal things. She had accepted the ID card because it was a handy kind of thing to have when no one believed you were sixteen but she had never taken up the offer of the bus passYou never knew, it might be the first step on a slippery slope that would eventually lead to something much bigger. Billy had started with pinching sweets from Mr Hussain's shop, and look at him now, pretty much a career criminal.
    'Have you had much experience with children, Reggie?' Dr Hunter had asked at her so-called interview.
    'Och, loads. Really. Loads and loads,' Reggie replied, smiling and nodding encouragingly at Dr Hunter, who didn't seem very good at the whole interviewing thing. 'Loads, sweartogod.'
    Reggie wouldn't have employed herself. Sixteen and no experience of children, even though she had great character references from Mr Hussain and Ms MacDonald and a