BIG SKY Kate Atkinson Thank you for downloading this eBook. All the books totally free of charge, if you like to receive our books on the next time, please Subscribe and join our free books group. Subscribe Contents 7. Eloping 8. One Week Earlier 1. Anderson Price Associates 2. The Battle of the River Plate 3. Albatross 4. And All Things Nice 5. Saving Lives at Sea 6. Sugar and Spice 7. The Kray Twins 8. The Nineteenth Hole 9. Holding Out for a Hero 10. Summer Season 11. Time, Gentlemen 12. Encore 13. WWMMD? 14. Darcy Slee 15. Beachcombing 16. Lady with Lapdog 17. The Final Straw 18. Treasure Trove 19. Paperwork 20. Tipping Point 21. Curtain Call 22. Stage Fright 23. Everyone Wants to Be the Wolf 24. Girls, Girls, Girls 25. Wuthering Heights 26. The Unicorn in the Room 27. Transylvanian Families 28. Mustn’t Grumble 29. Two-Way Traffic 30. A Panda Walks into a Bar 31. Funny Business 32. En Famille 33. Angel of the North 34. Babes in the Wood 35. Hansel and Gretel 36. The Final Curtain 37. Catch of the Day 38. Hand of Glory 39. Women’s Work 40. Be the Wolf 41. Blood Poisoning 42. Cranford World 43. Tonto 44. The Tree of Knowledge 45. Showtime! 46. Sometimes You’re the Windshield 47. Thisldo 48. Haulage 49. House of Mirth 50. Fake News 51. High Noon 52. That’s All, Folks 53. Don’t Just Fly 54. Just the Facts, Ma’am 55. Trouble at t’Mill 56. Know When to Hold Them 57. Getting the Hell out of Dodge 58. What Would Tatiana Do? 59. Kill the Buddha 60. Darcy Slee 61. The Fat Lady Sings 9. Acknowledgements 10. Song References 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 bestselling 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 Two: 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 Life After Life A God in Ruins Transcription FEATURING JACKSON BRODIE Case Histories One Good Turn When Will There Be Good News? Started Early, Took My Dog For Alison Barrow Before Enlightenment I chopped wood and carried water. After Enlightenment I chopped wood and carried water. Zen saying ‘I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against.’ Malcolm X Eloping ‘So what now?’ he asked. ‘A quick getaway,’ she said, shucking off her fancy shoes into the passenger footwell. ‘They were killing me,’ she said and gave him a rueful smile because they’d cost a fortune. He knew – he’d paid for them. She had already removed her bridal veil and tossed it on to the back seat, along with her bouquet, and now she began to struggle with the thicket of grips in her hair. The delicate silk of her wedding dress was already crushed, like moth wings. She glanced at him and said, ‘As you like to say – time to get the hell out of Dodge.’ ‘Okay, then. Let’s hit the highway,’ he said and started the engine. He noticed that she was cupping the bowl of her belly where she was incubating an as yet invisible baby. Another branch to add to the family tree. A twig. A bud. The past counted for nothing, he realized. Only the present had value. ‘Wheels up, then,’ he said and put his foot down on the gas. On the way, they made a detour up to Rosedale Chimney Bank to stretch their legs and look at the sunset that was flooding the vast sky with a glorious palette of reds and yellows, orange and even violet. It demanded poetry, a thought he voiced out loud, and she said, ‘No, I don’t think so. It’s enough in itself.’ The getting of wisdom, he thought. There was another car parked up there, an older couple, admiring the view. ‘Magnificent, isn’t it?’ the man said. The woman smiled at them and congratulated the ‘happy couple’ on their wedding and Jackson said, ‘It’s not what it looks like.’ One Week Earlier Anderson Price Associates Katja scrutinized Nadja’s make-up. Nadja posed for her as if she were taking a selfie, cheeks sucked in like a corpse, mouth pouted extravagantly. ‘Yeah. Good,’ Katja pronounced finally. She was the younger of the two sisters but was by far the bossier. They could be twins, people always said. There were two years and one and a half inches between them. Katja was the smaller and the prettier of the two, although they were both petite and shared the same shade of (not entirely natural) blonde hair, as well as their mother’s eyes – green irises encircled by grey. ‘Hold still,’ Nadja said and brushed an eyelash off Katja’s cheek. Nadja had a degree in Hospitality Management and worked at the Radisson Blu, where she wore a pencil-skirted suit and two-inch heels and tidied her hair away in a tight bun while she dealt with complaining guests. People complained all the time. When she got home to her shoe-box apartment she shook her hair free and put on jeans and a big sweatshirt and walked around barefoot and no one complained because she lived on her own, which was the way she liked it. Katja had a job in Housekeeping in the same hotel. Her English wasn’t as good as her older sister’s. She didn’t have any qualifications beyond school and even those were mediocre because she had spent her childhood and most of her teenage years ice-skating competitively, but in the end she just wasn’t good enough. It was a cruel, vicious world and she missed it every day. The ice rink had made her tough and she still had a skater’s figure, lithe and strong. It drove men a little crazy. For Nadja it had been dancing – ballet – but she had given it up when their mother couldn’t afford to pay for lessons for both of them. She had sacrificed her talent easily, or so it seemed to Katja. Katja was twenty-one, living at home, and couldn’t wait to fly the stifling nest, even though she knew that a job in London would almost certainly be the same as the one she had here – making beds and cleaning toilets and pulling strangers’ soapy hair out of plugholes. But once she was there things would change, she knew they would. The man was called Mr Price. Mark Price. He was a partner in a recruitment agency called Anderson Price Associates – APA – and had already interviewed Nadja over Skype. Nadja reported to Katja that he was attractive – tanned, a full head of attractively greying hair (‘like George Clooney’), a gold signet ring and a heavy Rolex on his wrist (‘like Roger Federer’). ‘He’d better look out, I might marry him,’ Katja said to her sister and they both laughed. Nadja had emailed scans of her qualifications and references to Mark Price and now they were waiting in Nadja’s apartment for him to Skype from London again to ‘confirm all the details’ and ‘have a quick chat’ with Katja. Nadja had asked him if he could find work for her sister too and he said, ‘Why not?’ There was plenty of work in British hotels. ‘The problem is no one wants to work hard here,’ Mark Price said. ‘I want to work hard there,’ Nadja said. They weren’t stupid, they knew about trafficking, about people who tricked girls into thinking they were going to good jobs, proper jobs, who then ended up drugged, trapped in some filthy hole of a room having sex with one man after another, unable to get home again because their passports had been confiscated and they had to ‘earn’ them back. APA wasn’t like that. They had a professional website, all above board. They recruited all over the world for hotels, nursing homes, restaurants, cleaning companies, they even had an office in Brussels, as well as one in Luxembourg. They were ‘affiliated’ and recognized and had all kinds of testimonials from people. From what you could see of it on Skype, their office in London looked very smart. It was busy – you could hear the constant murmur of staff in the background, talking to each other, tapping keyboards, answering the ringing phones. And Mark Price himself was serious and businesslike. He talked about ‘human resources’ and ‘support’ and ‘employer responsibility’. He could help to arrange accommodation, visas, English tuition, ongoing training. He already had something in mind for Nadja, ‘one of the very top hotels’, but she could decide when she arrived. There were plenty of opportunities ‘for a bright girl’ like her. ‘And my sister,’ she had reminded him. ‘And your sister, yes, of course,’ he’d laughed. He would even pay their airfares. Most agencies expected you to pay them money up front for finding you a job.