One Good Turn

by Kate Atkinson

  He had a sudden, horrible thought. “Your sister’s not coming up for your first night, is she?”

  “Amelia?”

  It was odd the way she said that, as if there were a choice of sis-ters, as if Olivia and Sylvia were still alive. Maybe they were still alive for Julia.

  “Yes, Amelia.”

  “No. I told her to come later, when the play’s run in a bit. She won’t like it anyway, it’s not her kind of thing. She likes Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov. I thought she could come up and stay for a few days. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

  “Hold me back.”

  “Don’t be like that, Jackson. Amelia’s all I’ve got.”

  Jackson refrained from saying the obvious “You’ve got me” in case it provoked more arguments.

  “Oh, I nearly forgot,” Julia said, suddenly animated (when had her moods started changing so quickly?). She reached into her big carpetbag, pulling out an assortment of God knows what before finding what she was looking for. “Free tickets!” she said with an enforced gaiety. When Jackson made no attempt to take them, she pushed them into his hand.

  “Who did you have lunch with to get those?” he asked. Why couldn’t he keep his mouth shut? He’d meant it to come out as a joke (not a good one, admittedly), but it ended up sounding offensive. Julia just laughed, though, and said, “Oh, sweetie, I had to fuck two clowns and an elephant to get those tickets. The circus, Jackson, they’re tickets for the circus, they were handing them out for free, drumming up trade, the circus wallah chappie gave them to me. It’ll be good sport. Go. Relive the childhood you never had.”

  “A lime daiquiri and a Glenfiddich, please,” Jackson said to the barman. It was a nice old-fashioned pub, no music or game ma-chines, lots of polished wood and stained glass. He wasn’t a whiskey drinker by nature, yet he seemed to have drunk a lot of the stuff since arriving. It must have been in his Scottish blood all this time, calling to him.

  “And yet you’ve never visited Scotland before?” Louise Mon-roe said. “That’s odd, don’t you think? Do you think you’re avoiding something? Psychologically speaking.” No small talk then, Jackson thought, none of that getting-to-know-you stuff, pussy-footing around each other’s past. “I was in France on holiday.”“Oh? What part?” or “You like country music? What a coincidence, so do I.” Cutting straight to the chase instead—“Are you psychologically damaged? Are you in avoidance about something?”

  “I don’t know,” Jackson said. “Are you? Avoiding something?”

  “Question with a question,” she said as if he’d just failed a test. “The psychopathology of it is interesting, though, isn’t it?” “That’s a big word,” Jackson said. “Pretty and smart, huh?” “You may behave like an idiot, but you’re not stupid.” Jackson wondered if that was supposed to be a compliment. “Anyway, cheers,” she said, taking a healthy swig of her lime

  daiquiri.

  “Confusion to kings and tyrants,” Jackson responded, raising his glass. He was under the impression that a daiquiri was the kind of drink you were supposed to sip. He avoided cocktails in case they arrived encumbered with parasols and sickly sweet cherries on sticks, but the daiquiri looked clean and inviting.

  “Try it,” she said, holding the glass out to him, and he felt shocked by the sudden intimacy of the offer. He had been brought up in a parsimonious household where they tended to steal food off one an-other’s plates, not offer it up willingly. He could still see his brother, Francis, winking at him while he filched a sausage off his sister—and getting a box on the ear from Niamh for his efforts. Julia, on the other hand, would share with a dog, she was forever pushing forks and spoons into his mouth, “Try this, eat this,” licking her lips, sucking her fingers, he’d never met anyone before for whom the line between food and sex was so thin. The things she could do with a strawberry were enough to make a grown man blush. He had a sudden image of her in the Nell Gwyn costume, volunteering her breasts to the photographer, oranges are the only fruit. He had seen that on television, Julia had read the book, that was the difference between them. She had a little gap between her front teeth that gave her the slightest of lisps. It was funny—he’d always been aware of that, yet he’d never really thought about it before.

  “No, you’re all right,” he said to Louise Monroe, lifting his glass to prove that he was happy with his own choice of alcohol, and she said, “I wasn’t offering to share DNA with you.”

  “I didn’t think you were.”

  The pub was on a street off the Royal Mile, close to the offices of Favors.

  “I see you found the soot-blackened, whiskey-soaked, blood-sodden metaphysical core of the wen that was Edinburgh,” she said when she met him in the cobbled close.

  “Right,” he said. She could be quite wordy once she got going. Like Julia. He had finally managed to get a call through to her, and all she could say was, “You should have phoned me before you came here. Oh, no, wait a minute, you’re not a policeman, are you? You shouldn’t have been here in the first place.”

  “I couldn’t get ahold of you, you didn’t give me your mobile number.”

  “Well, I’m here now, and what exactly am I looking for? I see a very dodgy-looking sauna and a doomed production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle.”

  “Shit,”Jackson said, staring at the entrance. There was no longer any sign saying FAVORS—IMPORT AND EXPORT, no sign saying anything at all. No buzzer, no camera. The door was still there, Jackson was relieved to see, so he hadn’t entered some parallel uni-verse, and when Louise Monroe gave it a push, it opened with the theatrical kind of creak that a sound-effects man would have been proud of. They made their way up the stairs, if they had been Americans they would have had their guns out by now, Jackson thought, but as it was, being Scottish and half-Scottish, they had nothing to defend themselves with but their wits.

  “First floor,” Jackson whispered.

  “Why are you whispering?” Louise asked in a loud voice that echoed in the stairwell. “I thought you said they were a cleaning agency.”

  “They are,” he said. “Sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “No, they are, definitely,” Jackson said, “I mean I’ve seen them cleaning—scrubbing, hoovering, that sort of thing. They wear pink uniforms.” He had an image of Marijut’s buttocks moving rhythmically and immediately dismissed it. “It’s just there’s something . . . odd about them. I don’t know. A lot of industrial-cleaning firms take on ex-cons, you know, maybe there’s a link. The girls I saw on Morningside were definitely legit cleaners. I thought I saw the dead girl’s photograph on their database.”

  The place was abandoned, no computer, no filing cabinet or desk, the Housekeeper and the receptionist had packed up and gone. The place felt as if it had never been occupied in the first place, the cheap contract carpeting, slightly tacky underfoot, the chipped paintwork and the unwashed windows, all bore no hint that a couple of hours previously there had been a business here. There was a smell of something stale and slightly rank.

  “What database would that be, then?” Louise Monroe mur-mured, looking around the empty space. “The one on that invis-ible computer over there?”

  “I don’t understand,” Jackson muttered. He spotted something on the carpet, a tiny painted wooden doll, no bigger than a peanut. He picked it up and peered at it, and Louise Monroe said, “You need spectacles, you shouldn’t be so vain.”

  Jackson ignored the comment. “What is that?” he asked, holding the little doll up for her inspection.

  “It’s from one of those Russian doll sets,” she said, “the ones that nest inside one another. Matri-something.”

  “Matryoshka?”

  “Yes.”

  “This one doesn’t open,” Jackson said.

  “That’s because it’s the last one. The baby.”

  Jackson pocketed the doll. It was less than two hours since he was here, how could they have just packed up their tents and slipped away without leaving a trace behind?
No, they had left something—he spotted something on a windowsill. A pink card. FAVORS—WE DO WHAT YOU WANT US TO DO! He pounced on it and held it up for Louise Monroe’s inspection. “See,” he said triumphantly. “I didn’t make it up.”

  “I know,” she said, producing an identical card from her pocket. “Snap.”

  “Where did you get that?”

  “From the body of a dead prostitute.”

  “Dead? As in ‘murdered’ dead?”

  “No, she OD’d. No foul play, apart from drug trafficking, prostitution, economic exploitation, illegal immigration, of course. It’s not my case,” she said with a shrug, as if she didn’t care. Jackson was pretty sure that wasn’t so.

  “Two dead girls turning up within twenty-four hours of each other,” Jackson said, “both with these cards on their bodies? What does that say to you?”

  “The cards are the only thing that links them.”

  “But that’s enough,” Jackson persisted. “I’ll bet you the cleaning agency’s a front, maybe it’s a way of getting girls into the coun-try, maybe they pick out the more vulnerable ones, take their pass-ports, threaten people they’ve left behind. You know the kind of stuff that goes on, for Christ’s sake. There’s a connection between the two girls, there has to be. It leads back to this place.”

  “Could just be a coincidence.”

  “You’re playing devil’s advocate. And I don’t believe in coinci-dence,” Jackson said. “A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen.”

  “So much wisdom from one so foolish, and I would just like to remind you once again that you are not a policeman and this is not your case.”

  “No, it’s your case.” Frustration was beginning to get the better of him. He wished he’d slapped a pair of handcuffs on the “Housekeeper” and secured her to the nearest heavy object. Or if he could have only anchored his dead girl to a buoy or clamped the pink van this afternoon, taken Marijut into custody, anything that would have provided immovable evidence rather than this shifting mirage. He felt as if he were trying to hold on to water. “If you believed me it would help,” he said, sounding more pa-thetic than he’d intended.

  He thought she might get stroppy with him (yet again), but she walked over to one of the filthy windows and gazed out at the view—a stone wall opposite. Then she sighed and said, “Well, the sun’s over the yardarm and I’m off the clock. And I want a drink.”

  “You like country music?” Louise Monroe said doubtfully. “Good-hearted women and bad-living men and all that stuff?”

  “Well, it’s not all like that.”

  “And you live in France?”This was more like an interrogation than a conversation. He thought he preferred it when she was casting doubts on his “psychopathology” and calling him an idiot.

  “I’ve never been to France,” Louise said.

  “Not even Paris?”

  “No, not even Paris.”

  “Not even Disneyland?”

  “Christ, I haven’t been to France. Okay?”

  “Okay. Do you want another one?” he asked.

  “No thanks, I’m driving. I shouldn’t be drinking at all.”

  “And yet you are.” Their conversation had been restricted to an almost masculine neutrality, although Jackson admitted to a di-vorce and she shrugged and said, “Never married, never saw the point.” He had learned that she liked Saabs, she had fast-tracked to inspector, “climbing over the bodies on the way up,” she wore contacts (“You should try them”). But then she suddenly said, “Do you have someone?” and he said, “Julia. She’s an actress.” He could hear himself sounding apologetic, as if an actress were something to be embarrassed by (which it frequently was). If Louise hadn’t asked, would Jackson have owned up to Julia? The sad male answer was no. “She’s in a play at the Festival.”

  “What’s Julia like?”

  “She’s an actress.”

  “You said that already.”

  “I know, but it does kind of explain her. I don’t know, she’s short, she’s an optimist. Usually,” he added.

  “You described a dead body to me better than that,” Louise said.

  “Julia’s hard to explain,” he said, gazing at the dregs of his whiskey as if they held the key. Julia was impossible to describe, you had to know her to understand her. “She’s like . . . herself.”

  “Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it?” Louise said.

  “Yes, I suppose it is,”he said. And yet it didn’t feel like that. That was the trouble, of course. You started off liking someone because of who she was and you ended up wanting her to be different.

  He liked Louise because she was bolshie and cynical and sure of her-self, but give them a few months and those would be the things that would drive him crazy. Give them a few months—what was he thinking?

  “Well, thanks for the drink,” Louise Monroe said abruptly, standing up and putting on her jacket. “I should go.”

  He would have offered to help her with the jacket, but he didn’t know if she would like that. He did hold the door open for her, though. His mother had instilled manners into him, mostly by cuffing him about the head. “Always hold open a door, always offer your seat. No gentleman would let a lady walk on the outside of the pavement.” She had been brought up in a backward part of Ireland where they didn’t even have pavements, but she didn’t want her sons to grow up like their father. He’d never really understood about the outside of the pavement. (“So you can die first if a horse and carriage swerves out of control, of course,” Julia explained.)

  He walked up the high street with Louise, the farther up the street they got, the more revelers they encountered, plus all the usual sus-pects—fire-eaters, jugglers, unicyclists, or any combination of the three. A guy on a unicycle juggling with flaming torches, really pushing the envelope. There was a woman pretending to be some kind of living statue of Marie Antoinette. Was that really a suitable job for a woman? For anyone, come to that? How would he feel if Marlee grew up and announced she wanted to do that for a living?

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Louise Monroe said, “doing absolutely nothing all day, I could do with some of that.”

  “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, trust me.”

  They hesitated awkwardly on the pavement at a crossroad for a few seconds as if they were both unsure of the correct form of farewell address. For a delusional second Jackson thought she was going to kiss him on the cheek, one half of him hoped she would, the other half was terrified she would, good and bad Jacksons having a little tussle. But she just said, “Right. I’ll let you know if anything turns up.”

  “Anything?”

  “Your girl.”

  “His” dead girl, he ruminated. She was his girl, for better or worse, no one else wanted to own her or claim her or even acknowledge her existence.

  “Well, good night,” she said.

  “I don’t suppose you want to go to the circus, do you?”

  31

  Martin was in a different room at the Four Clans. He was lying on the bed, trying to have a nap. His body was exhausted, but his brain had apparently discovered a secret amphetamine factory and was popping pills at will. The picture on the wall oppo-site his bed was a print of Burke and Hare caught in the act of gleefully digging up a dead body, almost, but not quite, trumping the flaming witch of the previous room. He sat up and twisted round in order to see what was hanging above the bed. The Battle of Flodden Field, the slaughter of the Scots in full swing. Twenty-four hours ago he didn’t even know that the Four Clans existed, now his entire life seemed contained within its tartan walls. He was being brainwashed by plaid.

  He turned the television on and caught an evening Scottish news bulletin. “The comic Richard Mott... battered to death... home of crime writer Alex Blake . . . earlier in an extraordinary mix-up . . . reclusive writer Alex Blake, whose real name was . . . a spokesman for Lothian and Borders Police said that they are appealing for witnesses to the murder... the Merchiston area of E
dinburgh.” He turned the television off.

  He didn’t have any books with him, nor his laptop, of course, so he could neither read nor write. Martin hadn’t realized how much of his life was taken up by these two activities. How would he manage if he became blind or deaf ? Or both? At least if he was blind he could get a guide dog—there was an upside to every-thing, a silver lining of helpful Labs and noble German shepherds eager to be his eyes. They had dogs for the deaf too, but Martin wasn’t sure what they did. Tugged at your sleeve a lot, probably, while looking meaningfully at things.

  His phone chirruped, and he listened to the rich Dublin tones of his agent. “Are you dead, Martin,” she asked, “or not dead? Only I wish you’d make up your mind, because I’m fielding a lot of questions here.”

  “Not dead,” Martin said. “It said on the television news that I’m a recluse. Why would they say that? I’m not reclusive, I’m not a recluse.”

  “Well, you don’t have a lot of friends, Martin.” Melanie dropped her voice as if there were other people in the room with her and said, “Did you kill him, Martin? Did you kill Richard Mott? I know we always say that no publicity is bad publicity, but murder’s a line you can’t really cross. You know what I’m saying?”

  “Why on earth would I kill Richard Mott? What would make you think that?”

  “Where were you when he died?” Melanie asked.

  “In a hotel,” Martin said.

  “With a woman?” she said, sounding surprised.

  “No, with a man.”Whichever way he said it, it wasn’t going to sound right. He couldn’t imagine what she would say if he told her about the gun. The gun had become a guilty secret he was carrying around with him. He should have just told the police, brazened out their incredulity, but spending the night with an armed assassin didn’t seem like a very good alibi.

  “Jesus,” Melanie said. “Do you have a lawyer, Martin?” She let pass what she obviously thought was a decent interval and then said, “How’s the book going, anyway?”