One Good Turn

by Kate Atkinson

  “Murdered,” Julia said. Last night he had watched Richard Mott onstage, now the poor guy was in a refrigerator somewhere. Jack-son would have applauded him more generously if he’d known it was his final appearance. Was he murdered because he wasn’t funny? People killed for less. The reasons people killed other peo-ple had often seemed trivial to Jackson when he was with the po-lice, but he supposed it was different from the inside. He had once been in charge of a case where an eighty-year-old man had hit his wife on the head with a mash hammer because she’d burned his morning porridge, and when Jackson said to the old bloke that it didn’t seem like a reason that was going to stand up in court, the man said, “But she burned it every morning for fifty-eight years.” (“You could have had a word about it with her earlier,” a DS said dryly to him, but that wasn’t how it worked in a marriage, Jack-son knew that.) When you retold it, it seemed almost funny, but there had been nothing comical in seeing the old woman’s brains all over the worn linoleum or watching the old guy, all rheumy eyes and shaking hands, being put in the back of a police car.

  To be honest, Jackson was surprised that more people didn’t kill each other. Julia was definitely lying to him about something.

  One face in the sea of faces across the other side of the ring caught his attention. It wasn’t just a cliché, it really was a sea of faces, he found it almost impossible to focus on one. He’d been under the impression that long sight was supposed to improve with age and short sight deteriorate (or was it the other way round?), but he seemed to be losing out on both of them. But if he concentrated, no, it was actually better if he didn’t concentrate, he could make out the girl. Her face was tilted upward, watching the trapeze artists, her expression serene, beatific. Her eyes only half-open, as if she were watching but thinking of something else. She was so like the dead girl it was impossible. His girl, curled up on the rocks, a mermaid dreaming, and he had disturbed her sleep. He squinted, trying to make out the features of the girl in the au-dience, but his focus slipped and she was gone, swimming off into the sea of faces.

  He fell asleep while a human pyramid was being constructed out of acrobats, and when he woke he felt disoriented. The roof of the big top was dark blue, spangled with silver stars, and it reminded him of something but he couldn’t think what, and then he realized it was the roof—the vault of heaven—in a side chapel at the Catholic church where his mother dragged them three times a day on a Sunday when they were very small, until she ran out of energy and let the devil have them.

  Maybe Julia wasn’t lying exactly, just not telling the truth.

  When Jackson exited the big top on the Meadows along with the rest of the audience, he was greeted by a pearly dusk. The gloaming. It was so much lighter up here, a transient Nordic light that spoke to his soul. He took a seat on a bench and turned his phone on. There was a text from Julia, “In the trav bar come and find us” (not even a “J” or a single “x” this time, he noticed, let alone “love” or punctuation). It sounded more like a challenge or a treasure hunt than an invitation to a drink. He guessed “the trav” was the Traverse, which was both good and bad, good because it was nearby and he was sure he knew how to get there, bad because he’d been there the first night with Julia and the cast, and it was a smoky underground place full of posers up from London. Maybe he could persuade her out of there, take her to one of the many Italian restaurants around this part of town. He seemed to remember a plan to cook for her tonight. The best laid plans of mice and men. They had studied that book at school, that is to say his fellow pupils had studied it at school, Jackson had looked out the window or played truant. He remembered the little plaque at the Scottish War Memorial. THE TUNNELLERS’ FRIENDS. He felt strangely bereft.

  Although there were still plenty of people milling about, light was fading fast on the Meadows, and away from the streetlamps that bordered the paths there were now murky pools of darkness presenting opportunities for all kinds of transgression. Everything suddenly seemed darker, and Jackson realized that the lights on the big top had been switched off. Something seemed to drop inside him, a leaden weight, a memory of walking home from that circus forty-odd years ago, holding his mother’s hand—his mother was no more than a shadow of a memory now—walking away up a hill, it was a town built on hills, and looking back and seeing the big top, ablaze with lights, being abruptly plunged into darkness. It had disturbed him in a way that, as a small boy, he couldn’t put words to. Now he knew it was melancholy. Melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic—that was what Louise Monroe had called him yester-day. “You seem remarkably phlegmatic, Mr. Brodie.” What was the fourth? Sanguine. But melancholy, that was his own true humor. A miserable bastard, in other words.

  “The lamps are going out all over Europe,” he thought. God, that was a wretched quotation. He had been reading a lot of military history lately, courtesy of Amazon. He thought of the Binyon poem again. “At the going down of the sun.” The rest of the verses were crap. Earl Grey was actually watching the streetlamps being lit, not put out, although, of course, some people thought it was an apocryphal quotation. God, would you look at him, a sad middle-aged loser sitting on a park bench at twilight thinking about an old war he never took part in. Jackson rarely thought about the wars he had taken part in. All he needed was a can of lager. When had he started thinking of himself as a loser? “We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” He wouldn’t blame Julia if she had grown bored with him.

  And then, instantly, his self-pity was forgotten because there she was. It was her, it was his dead girl. He hadn’t imagined her in the big top, she had been there and now she was here, walking across the Meadows, in and out of the shadows cast by the trees, coming toward him.

  She was wearing heels and a short summer skirt so that you couldn’t help but admire her perfect legs. He stood up abruptly and set off toward her, wondering what he should say—“Hey,you look just like a dead girl I know”? As opening conversational gambits went, it left something to be desired. He knew she wasn’t really his dead girl, unless the dead had begun to walk, which he was pretty sure they hadn’t. He couldn’t imagine the kind of chaos that would ensue if they did.

  And then—and in Jackson’s opinion this was becoming just a wee bit tiresome—who should slip out of the shadows but his old enemy, Honda Man. Terence Smith creeping up behind the not-dead girl on tiptoe in a way that reminded Jackson of a cartoon character. The man was a juggernaut, juggernauts shouldn’t try to tiptoe. The girl might not be dead, but it looked as if Terence Smith were intending to make her that way, not with his trusty bat in his hand but a length of what looked like nylon rope. Dog, bat, rope—he was a one-man arsenal. “Hey!” Jackson yelled to get the girl’s attention. “Behind you!” Did he really say that? But it was no pantomime joke and no pantomime thuggee—Terence Smith already had the rope round her neck. Jackson’s warning cry had alerted her, however, and she had managed to get her hands on the rope, tugging on it for all she was worth to prevent Terence Smith from tightening it.

  Jackson sprinted along the path toward the two of them. There were other people closer, but they seemed benignly unaware of a girl being strangled in front of their eyes. Before Jackson reached them, the girl managed to do something swift and admirably effective that seemed to involve the heel of her shoe and Honda Man’s groin, and poor old Terry collapsed onto the ground with an ugly noise. Unmanned, Jackson thought. The girl didn’t hang around, instead she kicked off her shoes and started running back the way she had come, in the direction of the circus, and by the time Jackson reached Terence Smith, now retching with shock, the girl was out of sight.

  Honda Man’s moans attracted a couple of passersby who seemed to be of the opinion that he was the victim of an assault and that the perpetrator of the assault must be the man standing over him. Been here, done this, Jackson thought. His brain was lagging vital seconds behind, still trying to compute the convergence of himself, his old pal Terry, and a girl who looked like the dead girl in the Forth.
He had seen the crucifixes in her ears as she struggled with her assailant. You say coincidence, he thought, I say connection. A baffling, impenetrably complex connection, but nonetheless a connection. Jackson was torn between wanting to interrogate Terence Smith, with the added bonus of then beating him to a pulp, or running after the dead girl look-alike.

  The decision was made for him by the arrival of a police car containing two uniformed constables, one male, one female, a breeding pair, who were soon out of the car and walking along the path in that determined way Jackson remembered well, slow enough to assess a situation but ready to accelerate at the drop of a hat. One of the passersby pointed at Jackson and shouted, “This is the man who did it!” Oh thanks, Jackson thought, thanks very much. He’d already been convicted of assaulting Terence Smith once already today, a second time would probably send him straight to jail. He took a deep breath, which hurt, and ran.

  One of the police, the female of the pair, stayed with Terence Smith, who was still making a fuss over his manhood. Jackson would quite like to have known what exactly the girl did back there and hand on the arcane knowledge to the women in his life the next time they found themselves being lifted off their feet with a rope round their neck. God forbid.

  The other constable lumbered along the path after Jackson. He was on the hefty side and normally Jackson could have outrun him easily, but he was handicapped by his bruised ribs, so he darted off the main drag into the tangle of caravans and lorries that surrounded the big top. He stumbled and tripped, knocked something flying. Someone shouted abuse at him, and he didn’t stop to find out who or why but carried on running, weaving in and out of the assortment of vehicles that made up the circus laager.

  He paused inside an avenue of trucks to catch a breath. He could hear the policeman talking to someone. He rather hoped that some vagabond instinct among the members of the circus troupe would lead them to help him and misdirect the law (“He went that way”). No such luck. The police constable, unfit but dogged, passed across the top of the avenue of trucks. Jackson flattened himself against the side of a huge generator, but too late, the guy had spotted him, yelling something inarticulate in surprise at suddenly coming upon his quarry. The policeman in Jackson wanted to reassure him that he wasn’t dangerous, the guy didn’t have his partner with him, no one covering his back, and had no idea what Jackson was capable of, so he was probably more scared than Jackson was. What was he capable of? he wondered.

  He didn’t hang around to find out, instead he was off again, helter-skeltering around the parked convoy. The chase was telling on him, his ribs aching so much he could barely keep upright. Just when he thought he was going to have to give up this game of hide-and-seek, someone or something (he hoped it was someone) grabbed him by the arm and pulled him into the dark.

  Not entirely dark, just enough light to make him realize he was somewhere in the hinterlands of the big top, the space where the performers waited to make their entrance. Ahead of him a tunnel led to the ring itself, it reminded him for a moment of the Colosseum. He had taken Marlee to Rome last year. They had eaten a lot of ice cream and pizza. All his recent memories were of holi-days.

  There was enough light, too, to catch a glimpse of the knife glinting near his throat. His first thought was that it was Terence Smith with his Clue armory, but there was surely no way he could have got here so fast. He twisted his neck round, felt the knife scratching dangerously near an artery. The dead girl look-alike. She smiled. She had a feral look about her that didn’t invite smiling back. All that was needed were a few clowns and the night-mare would be complete.

  “Shut up, okay?” she said. She sounded foreign, he didn’t know why that should be a surprise, everyone he encountered seemed to be foreign.

  “Okay,” he agreed. She moved the knife an inch away from his neck. He was so close to her that he could smell the cigarette smoke on her, mingled with perfume. It made him want a ciga-rette. It made him want sex. An idea that surprised him, consid-ering the circumstances. He wondered if the earrings were the sign of a cult, some born-again Christian thing. She didn’t look like any Christian he’d met before, but you never could tell. Had she saved him from the police in order to kill him? That made no sense, but then nothing made any sense.

  “You look like someone who’s dead,” he whispered. Yes, he had decided this was a conversation killer, but here he was using it anyway.

  “I know,”she said. This was an unexpected answer. She lowered the knife a little more.

  “Your sister?” he hazarded.

  “No, friend,”she said, and with a shrug, “we look alike, that’s all.”

  “Honda Man—Terence Smith—why did he attack you?”

  Her green eyes narrowed and she laughed derisively. “The gimp?” she said contemptuously. “He’s idiot.”

  “Yeah, I know he’s idiot, but he still tried to kill you.”

  She made some kind of gesture that he suspected was obscene where she came from. Russia, by the sound of her. “Da,” she agreed. She seemed impressively unflustered by the fact that someone had just tried to kill her. He wondered if it happened to her a lot.

  “I saw you at the circus,” he said.

  “Circus is illegal now?” she said. She wasn’t good at small talk.

  “What’s your name?” he ventured. “My name’s Jackson Brodie.” I used to be a policeman.

  “I don’t have a name, I don’t exist,” she hissed, “and you won’t if you don’t shut up.” Really bad at small talk.

  “We’re on the same side,” Jackson said. It seemed unlikely, but wasn’t his enemy’s enemy his friend?

  “I’m not on side. Listen—”A little jab of the knife in his ribs to get his attention.

  “That hurts.”

  “So?”

  He couldn’t imagine why he had worried about her being attacked. Another little poke with the knife in his ribs.

  “Okay, okay, I’m listening,” he said.

  “Stop putting your nose in places, I’m taking care of it.”

  “Taking care of what?”

  She dug the point of the knife further into his ribs, the bruised, aching ribs, and said, “We can go now,” in a decisive way that brooked no argument. She walked him across the circus ring, eerily dark and robbed of illusion, and made him crawl under the flap on the other side, behind the tiers of empty seats. Out on the grass, in the cool night air, there was no sign of Terence Smith or the police.

  “I save your bacon,” she said and laughed, apparently pleased with her mastery of English metaphor. “Now get lost.” She started walking away, she was barefoot but she didn’t seem to notice. He followed her, limping along, a lame dog. “Fuck off,” she said without looking back at him.

  “Tell me about your friend, the dead girl in the water,” he per-sisted. “Who was she?” She carried on walking but raised the knife so he could see it. It was smaller than he thought, but it looked sharp and she definitely had the air of someone who would use it without any qualms. He had respect for knives, he’d seen a lot of stabbing victims in his time, and most of them weren’t around to talk about the experience.

  “Did Terence Smith kill your friend?” They passed a knot of people who didn’t even give them a second glance—the barefoot girl, the knife, the limping man, the dubious dialogue—Jackson supposed they were taken for Fringe performers.

  “You’re big nuisance, Jackson Brodie!” the girl shouted. They reached a main thoroughfare and suddenly there was traffic and people everywhere. Jackson vaguely recognized the street, it was near the museum on Chambers Street, near the Sheriff Court, scene of his disgrace this morning. Hard to believe it was still the same day.

  He was desperately trying to make sense of things before she es-caped him. Terence Smith had tried to kill the crazy Russian girl. The crazy Russian girl was a friend of his dead girl. Terence Smith had attacked him and told him to forget what he had seen. Jack-son thought he meant the road-rage incident, but what if he meant what
had happened on Cramond Island? Because he was the only witness who knew the girl was dead, apart from the crazy Russian girl. And Terence Smith had just tried to kill her. For the first time since he’d taken his unwelcome dip in the river, he could see something that made sense. A tangible connection, not just a coincidence.

  The Russian girl was waiting to cross the road, hovering on the edge of the pavement, looking for a gap in the cars like a greyhound impatient for the trap to open. The traffic slowed to a halt at the red light just as he caught up with her, and he made a grab for her arm to hold her back. He half-expected to be stabbed or bitten, but she just glared at him. The green man on the pedes-trian flashed and beeped behind them, people hurrying across. It turned back to red and she was still glaring at him. He wondered if he was going to turn to stone.

  A sudden loud bang made Jackson jump. He had once watched his own house explode and tended to be wary of loud noises.

  “It’s firework,” the girl said, “for Tattoo.” Sure enough, in the distance, a huge flower of glittering sparks bloomed above the Castle and fell slowly to earth. Then, without warning, she leaned toward him and put her lips close to his ear as if she were going to kiss him, but instead she said, “Real Homes for Real People,” then she laughed as if she had made an incredibly funny joke.

  “What?” She turned to go, pulling her arm away, and he said, “Stop, don’t go, wait. How can I get in touch with you?”

  She laughed again and said, “Ask for Jojo.”And then she crossed on the red man, holding up the cars with an imperious salute. She really did have perfect legs.

  By the time he ducked into the Traverse, Julia and the rest of the company were long gone. He presumed Julia would be at home, but when he finally made it back to the flat, there was no sign of her, even though it was after midnight. He tried phoning, but her phone was turned off. He was so tired that he hardly noticed when she slipped into bed next to him.