When Will There Be Good News?: To Brig o’ Dread Thou Com’st at Last Summary & Analysis

Jackson finds his way onto a “late-running and oversubscribed cattle track of a train,” cold and exhausted. He sees a couple of soldiers on the train and is reminded of his younger self. At that age, he’d sworn he wouldn’t go into security after leaving the army. Instead he’d become a warrant officer in the military police. After he left the police, he’d again sworn that he wouldn’t go into security, so he’d set up a one-man detective agency instead. An elderly client has left him a legacy, so he doesn’t have to worry about his retirement. His business card now says “Jackson Brodie—Security Consultant.” It’s not exactly a “righteous cause” (Jackson thinks of himself deep down as “a crusader, not a pilgrim”), but it’s better than idleness. The inheritance money feels like an unearned burden.

Jackson is crammed into an uncomfortable seat at a table for four. There’s a coughing businessman typing on a laptop, an elderly woman reading a novel, and a buxom woman of about 40. Jackson idly wonders if they’d help one another in an emergency. Jackson helped at the scene of a train crash as a young policeman, and it gave him nightmares for months. The memory of a child who’d been trapped in the crash reminds Jackson of his own children. He fingers the lock of hair he’s snagged from Nathan and thinks, “Love was ferocious, love knew how to play dirty.”

Jackson remembers visiting newborn Nathan in the hospital, even though Julia, from whom he’d long since broken up, maintained that the baby wasn’t his. Jackson remembers that seeing the baby was like “a blow to the heart” and that he’d wanted to beat the intruding Mr. Arty-Farty to a pulp on the spot, but had left when Nathan started to cry. Thinking that Nathan now lives in his own native Yorkshire, he realizes that traces of his sister Niamh’s DNA are in the hair he’s now holding.

Jackson finds himself thinking about Louise. They’d had a professional relationship in Edinburgh two years ago, but Jackson never stopped thinking about her, and they’ve texted occasionally. He was shocked to hear that Louise had gotten married a couple of months ago; he felt he’d been “drop-kicked into her past.”

Jackson is shaken out of his thoughts of Julia and her dying sister (the sister has breast cancer, which Jackson’s mother also died from) when the old woman passenger suddenly asks if they’ve passed the Angel of the North. Jackson realizes she thinks they’re headed north and doesn’t know how to break the bad news to her that it’s a southbound train. Finally he does, but the woman corrects him, saying, “Where do you think we’re going?” Jackson doesn’t believe her, but the other woman confirms that they’re headed to Waverley Station, Edinburgh.

A sudden jolt in the carriage startles everyone, but Jackson is more concerned about the fact that he’s accidentally caught the train from King’s Cross, not to King’s Cross. He realizes that the strolling woman he’d encountered in the Yorkshire Dales was right—he is going the wrong way.