One Good Turn

by Kate Atkinson

  There was a barbecue, “a family barbecue,” in progress and the man strode in, uninvited, unannounced, and picked up one of the kittens from the basket and bit its head off as if it were a lollipop. Had the man eaten the kitten’s head? Or just bitten it off and spat it out?

  You could put the man who bit the head off the kitten into a cage of tigers and say, “Go on, then, let’s see you bite the head off one of those.” But then it would be wrong to put the tigers in a cage. There was a Blake poem about that, wasn’t there? Or was it robins?

  Bill, the gardener, announced himself with the muffled clanking and thudding of tools in the shed, as if he wanted Gloria to know he was there but didn’t want to actually talk to her. His surname was Tiffany, like the jewelers. Graham had bought her a Tiffany watch for their thirtieth wedding anniversary. It had a red leather strap and little diamonds all round its face. She dropped it in the fishpond yesterday. All the fish in the pond except for one—a big golden orfe—had been gradually picked off by the neighborhood heron. Gloria wondered if the watch was still keeping time, ticking away quietly in the mud and green slime at the bottom of the pond, marking off the days left to both the big orange fish and Graham.

  Gloria made more coffee, buttered a scone, switched her computer on. Gloria was good with computers. She had learned way back when it was the old Amstrads, with their black-and-green screens and infuriating habits. In those days she used to help keep the accounts for Hatter Homes. That was before the firm took off, when Graham was still following in his father’s cautious footsteps, building small developments, the profits of one venture funding the building of the next. He was cooking the books even then, but the sums were still relatively small. Hatter Homes had remained a family business, owned by Graham and Gloria. It had never been floated on the stock exchange, never subject to rigorous external scrutiny. The auditing was done by his own accountants. There was a web of complicity stretching as far as the eye couldn’t see, accountants, lawyers, secretaries, sales force (sales-force-cum-mistresses). Gloria herself had signed anything put in front of her for years—papers, documents, contracts. She hadn’t questioned anything, and now she seemed to do nothing but question. Inno-cence was not ignorance.

  Gloria had a nice little laptop of her own, hooked up to a broadband connection in the kitchen—which was where she spent most of her time, after all, so why not? Graham never used her computer, he did all his dirty business in the office. She could imagine him going on pornography sites, watching one of those webcams where a woman in a room somewhere (anywhere) in the world performed for him.

  The only messages Gloria tended to get—apart from the odd missive from her children—were invitations to enlarge her penis or special offers from Boots.com. She would have liked to have checked Graham’s e-mail, but it was password protected. Gloria had been worrying away at it long before the events of yesterday, but she hadn’t yet come up with the open sesame—she had tried that too, along with every other word and combination of words she could think of. “Kinloch,” “Hartford,” “Braecroft,” “Hopetoun,” “Villiers,” and “Waverley.” Nothing. They were the names of the six basic models of Hatter Homes—the “Kinloch” was the cheapest, the “Waverley” the most expensive. The “Hart-ford” and the “Braecroft” were semidetached. Nowadays Graham built a lot more detached houses than he used to. People like de-tached no matter how small, the “Kinloch” was so tiny it reminded Gloria of a Monopoly house.

  Next month Gloria would be sixty. She had heard someone on the radio say that “sixty was the new forty.” She had never heard anything so stupid in her life. Sixty was sixty, there was no point in pretending otherwise. Who was going to provide for her in her old age? Whether Graham was dead or alive wasn’t going to make any difference to the police and the courts, they were going to de-stroy Hatter Homes. Quite rightly, in Gloria’s opinion, but it would have been nice if she could have salvaged a little pension for herself before they did. She imagined that somewhere there was a big black book that contained all of Graham’s secrets, all of his money. The Magus’s book. As with capitalism, it was too late to ask him about it now.

  She gave up on the password and checked her online bank account. They had a joint account that was mainly for day-to-day bills and housekeeping. Gloria was entirely dependent on Graham for money, a shocking realization that had taken several decades to sink in. One minute you’re sitting on a bar stool drinking a gin-and-orange, worrying about whether or not you look pretty, the next minute you’re a year away from a bus pass, staring bankruptcy and public humiliation in the face. And sixty was the same old sixty as it ever was.

  The housekeeping account was drip-fed automatically from a Hatter Homes account, whenever money was debited from it, more was credited, whatever went out one day was topped up overnight. It was almost like magic. No one seemed to have noticed the five hundred a day that Gloria had been siphoning off. Her nest egg. It was entirely legal, it was a joint account, her name was on it. Five hundred a day, every day except Sunday, Gloria’s day of rest, monitored by her Baptist conscience. The new money-laundering regulations made it difficult to move large sums of money around, but five hundred a day seemed to keep her below the radar of both the Hatter Homes accountants and the bank. Sooner or later, she supposed, an alarm bell would ring, a flag would go up, but by then the accounts would all probably be frozen, and if there was any justice in the world, Gloria would be gone with her black plastic bag of swag. Seventy-two thousand pounds wasn’t a lot to start a new life on, but it was better than nothing, better than what most people in the world had.

  Gloria emptied Graham’s belongings out of the bag and laid them on the maple wood draining board of the laundry room. His shoes, polished to a licorice-like shine, the jacket and trousers of his suit, the Austin Reed shirt, his expensive silk socks that someone, a nurse presumably, had rolled into a ball, the cotton vest and boxer shorts from Marks and Spencer—his underwear seemed particularly depressing to Gloria—and, last, his blandly corporate tie, curled limply at the bottom of the plastic bag like a dispirited snake.

  It was strange to see his clothes laid out like that, flat and two-dimensional, as if Graham had suddenly become invisible while wearing them. Now they had all been swapped for a cotton gown that showed his Roquefort legs and his not-so-firm buttocks. The cotton gown would in turn soon be swapped for a shroud. With any luck.

  Gloria had a sudden image of her brother’s mutilated body when it had been shown to his family in the hospital mortuary, wrapped up in white sheets, like a mummy or a present. Gloria wondered which of her parents had thought it was a good idea to let their fourteen-year-old daughter view the dead body of her brother, nicely wrapped or not.

  Jonathan had a place at college to do an HND and was working in the mill only for the summer between school and college. There had been several mills in Gloria’s hometown when she was a child, now there were none. Some had been demolished, but most had been converted into flats or hotels, one into an art gallery and another into a museum where ex-mill workers demonstrated to the public the jobs they used to do in a past that was now officially history.

  The week before her brother died, he had taken Gloria inside the mill. He was proud of where he was working, doing a “man’s job.” It wasn’t dark and satanic, as she had imagined from singing “Jerusalem” in school assemblies, rather it was full of light and as big as a cathedral, a hymn to industry. Tiny strands and puffs of wool floated in the air like feathers. And the noise! The “clattering, shattering, shuttling noise”—she had written a poem later for her grammar school magazine “in the style of Gerard Manley Hopkins,” thinking it might heal some part of the grief, but the poem was poor (“wool-dappled white air”) and came from the head, not the heart.

  There had been talk of prosecution after Jonathan’s death—all kinds of health and safety laws had been flouted at the mill—but it never progressed beyond talk, and Gloria’s parents lacked the passion to pursue it. Her sister (so
recently dead) was twenty at the time and upstaged their brother by turning up in a pair of jeans and a black polo-neck sweater for his Baptist funeral. Gloria had fully admired her sister’s gesture.

  The only other time Gloria had been inside a real cathedral of industry was long ago, on a school visit to Rowntree’s factory in York, when her class had marveled every step of the way, from the Smarties being tumbled around in what looked like copper ce-ment mixers to the packing room where women were tying ribbons around boxes of chocolates with (yes) pictures of kittens on them. At the end of the tour they had been given bags of mis-shapes of all kinds, and Gloria had returned home triumphantly bearing dozens of two-fingered KitKats that had, like Jonathan, been mangled by the machinery.

  She took the phone from Graham’s jacket pocket. What had Maggie Louden said last night? “Is it done yet, is it over? Have you got rid of Gloria? Have you got rid of the old bag?” Was that what she was—an old bag? Maggie Louden was well over forty, she’d be an old bag herself soon enough.

  The phone had run out of battery power (rather like its owner). Graham’s suit could do with going to the dry cleaners, but really, why bother? If he died, all of his suits were going to the Oxfam shop on Morningside Road, apart from the one he would wear for his funeral. This one might do, a bit of a brush and a press, no point in getting something cleaned when it was going into the ground to rot.

  She plugged Graham’s phone into the charger in the kitchen and carefully typed out a text to Maggie Louden. She tapped out “Am in thurso speak to you tomorrow g”—she was pretty sure Graham wouldn’t bother with any punctuation or grammar, but then she changed it to “Sorry darling am in thurso speak to you tomorrow g” and then redrafted it a third time to “Sorry darling am in thurso not much of a signal here don’t bother phoning speak to you tomorrow g.”

  What Gloria remembered most was that York was a town that smelled of chocolate whereas she came from a town that smelled of soot. Of course, you could no longer go on tours of Rowntree’s, now it was owned by some multinational conglomerate that didn’t want anyone inside their gates, watching what they were doing. Now that her sister was dead, Gloria was the only person who remembered her brother. It was extraordinary how quickly a person could be erased. Death triumphant.

  She took a bag of birdseed from underneath the sink in the laundry room and poured it into a bowl. Out in the garden, she broadcast the seed around the lawn and, for a moment, felt quite saintly as all the birds of Edinburgh descended on her garden.

  23

  Louise surveyed the corpse on the slab dispassionately. She considered it best to leave her emotions at the door when it came to postmortems. There were a lot of programs on television these days in which the police and the forensics all banged on about how a dead body wasn’t just a dead body, it was a person. The pathologists were always addressing the deceased as if they were alive (“Who did this to you, sweetheart?”), as if the victim were suddenly going to sit up and give them the name and address of their killer. The dead were just dead, they weren’t people anymore, they were only what was left over when the person was gone forever. The remains. She thought of her own mother and reached for the Tic Tacs.

  The mortuary was crowded with the usual suspects, a photog-rapher, technicians, forensics, two pathologists—a Noah’s Ark of postmortem specialists. Jim Tucker was standing off to one side, Louise knew he had a poor stomach for this kind of thing. He saw her and frowned, surprised that she was there. She gave him a thumbs-down signal and saw him mouth, “Oh, shit.”

  Ackroyd, the pathologist, caught sight of her and said, “You’ve missed a lot of the good stuff, stomach, lungs, liver.”Ackroyd was a bit of a pillock.

  The second pathologist on the sidelines acknowledged her with a little nod and a smile. She’d never seen him before. Only the most routine postmortems were done with one pathologist, two were considered necessary “for verification.” One and a spare. “Neil Snedden,” he said with another smile as if they were at a so-cial event. Was he flirting with her? Over a corpse? Nice.

  “You here for her?” he asked, nodding at the woman on the slab.

  “No, I need a word with Jim—DS Tucker.”

  The dead girl looked unhealthy, more unhealthy than just straightforward dead. Ackroyd hefted her heart in his hand. An assistant, a girl named Heather, if Louise remembered correctly, hovered nearby, holding a metal pan like a baseball mitt, as if the pathologist might be about to toss the organ in her direction. When it was placed, rather than thrown, on the dish, Heather took the heart away and weighed it as if she were intending to bake a cake with it.

  Louise reached out and touched the back of her hand against the nerveless one of the girl. Warm flesh against cold clay. The quick and the dead. She had a sudden memory of her mother at the undertaker’s, her face like cold, melted candle wax—the Wicked Witch of the West. Jim Tucker raised an inquiring eyebrow in her direction, and she gestured him to one side.

  The dead woman’s clothing was on a nearby bench, waiting to be bagged and taken to forensics at Howdenhall. The bra and pants weren’t a matching set, but they both displayed Matalan labels. This was why you should wear matching underwear, Louise reminded herself, not for the off chance of a sexual encounter but for eventualities like this. The dead-on-a-fishmonger’s-slab sce-nario where the whole world could see that you bought your oddly matched underwear in cheap shops.

  “Working girl, found in a doorway on Coburg Street. Drug overdose. Vice knew her,” Jim Tucker said. He dropped his voice. “What happened?”

  “Crichton threw the case out on a technicality. Nonappearance of a witness.”

  “You’re joking? He could have held off, asked us to find the witness.”

  “We’ll go to appeal,” Louise said. “It’ll be fine.”

  “Shit.”

  “I know.” Something caught her eye, on the bench with the clothing—a little pile of business cards sitting on a petri dish. “What are these?”

  “Found in her pocket,” Jim Tucker said. “The lady’s calling cards.”

  Pale pink, black lettering. FAVORS. A mobile number. Just like Jackson Brodie had said.

  “We thought maybe a call-girl agency,” Jim Tucker said. “We’ve not been able to get anything from the phone number.”

  “She’s got a call girl’s calling card but you think she’s a street girl?” Louise puzzled.

  “She was a druggie, I’m guessing it didn’t really matter to her whether she was in a hotel room or a doorway.”

  Louise didn’t think that was true for a minute. If she was selling herself, she’d rather be doing it in a nice, warm hotel room, knowing someone knew where she was. “I’ve been looking for Favors myself, we’ve come up with nothing so far.”

  “Something I should know about?” Jim Tucker asked.

  “Not really. A missing girl, but I’m not convinced she existed in the first place.”

  “Ah, your so-called dead body yesterday. I heard you called out all the troops for nothing. She hasn’t turned up?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What was that I heard about a body in Merchiston?”Ackroyd shouted across to her.

  “No idea,” she said. “That’s Edinburgh South, nothing to do with me.”

  “I live in Merchiston,”Ackroyd grumbled.

  “There goes the neighborhood, Tom.” Neil Snedden laughed. He winked at Louise. Louise wondered if she could have sex with someone who was so twinkly in the face of death. She supposed it would depend how good-looking he was. Snedden wasn’t remotely good-looking.

  Ackroyd took out a small electric saw and began to slice the top of the girl’s head off as if it were a boiled egg. “Look closely,” he said to a green Jim Tucker, “this is the only time you ever really get to see what’s inside a woman’s head.”

  The sight of Jackson Brodie walking out of the Sheriff Court this morning had given her a start. That little flip-flap to the telltale heart.

  Louise wondered wh
at Jackson Brodie had been like when he was fourteen. Did he have all his virtues (and drawbacks) in place by then, could you have looked at the boy and seen the man in him? Could you look at the man and see the boy?

  The pink cards existed. Louise had the proof in her pocket, the top one swiped from the pile while everyone was looking at Ackroyd performing his party piece. Okay, so it was tampering with evidence, but it wasn’t as if it were the only card. At the end of the day, what did it matter if there was one less? Really?

  She phoned Jeff Lennon, he was the guy at the station who knew everything. A DS a few weeks away from retirement, the face of a tortoise, the memory of an elephant. Handicapped by a bad knee, he was seeing out his last days doing a reluctant catch-up on paperwork, and she knew he would be glad of an excuse to do something else.

  “Do me a favor?” she asked him.

  “If you ask nicely.”

  “Nicely. Can you find out about a road-rage incident in the Old Town yesterday? The attacker drove off, can you check that someone caught the registration?” Jackson said there were “dozens of other witnesses,” but when Jeff phoned back a few minutes later, it was to report that no one had remembered, although “someone thought the car was blue.”

  “Well, I’m the bearer of good news,” she said. “Blue is correct, and what’s more it was a Honda Civic, and I can give you a reg-istration, I’ve got a witness.” She had called him “Jackson” to his face. It had felt unprofessional, even though it wasn’t.