When Will There Be Good News?: Great Expectations Summary & Analysis

Jackson is waiting outside the hospital for Louise. She ignores him, but he catches up with her, saying, “I’m sorry about your boy Marcus.” In her car, Jackson holds Louise while she cries. Then they talk about Joanna Hunter. Jackson already knows she’s found, of course, but he can’t tell Louise that he was there and that he personally destroyed the crime scene. There’s “a chasm between them now that could never be bridged because he could never tell her the truth.”

Jackson takes an overnight express coach to Heathrow to meet Tessa. He waits until the entire flight from Washington has emptied into the arrivals concourse and tries to make sense of his wife’s failure to appear. She could be tracking down lost luggage or have gotten held up at customs, or even missed the flight. Jackson checks with an airline official and learns that Tessa was never even booked on the flight; in fact, her name’s not in the database at all. Jackson waits for several more Washington flights to arrive, then aimlessly heads home. He talks himself into the idea that he’d gotten the day wrong and that Tessa is already at home, waiting for him. He finds the spare key he keeps above the lintel of a neighbor’s door, and it makes him think fleetingly of Joanna Hunter’s “inscrutable” life.

When Jackson enters his apartment, he’s greeted not by Tessa, but by the smell of death. A guy, dead for at least a day, is on the floor of his apartment, a Russian gun at his feet. There’s blood everywhere. Jackson carefully removes the guy’s wallet from his pocket and finds his own driver’s license. He almost dials Louise to tell her that he’s found Andrew Decker, but instead he calls 999.

A couple of days later, Jackson goes to the British Museum. No one there has ever heard of Tessa Webb. He calls in a favor from a detective friend, who reports that there’d never been a Tessa Webb at Oxford; there’s no driver’s license for her. The pathology report confirms that Decker killed himself. After 30 years in prison, he wouldn’t have had much trouble getting the gun.

When Jackson is allowed back into his crime-scene flat and retrieves his passport, he tries to withdraw money from his accounts and discovers that he doesn’t have any. Tessa had taken it all and moved it into untraceable accounts. Everything had been a setup—she and Jackson’s old boss Bernie had designed Tessa’s whole personality to appeal to Jackson, and he had fallen for it. Jackson doesn’t have the heart to be angry about it. He figures the money had “simply moved on to someone else who had never earned it.”