One Good Turn

by Kate Atkinson

  “I committed a crime,” Martin said. “And now I must be punished. An eye for an eye.”

  Jackson tried to be encouraging. “Come on now, Martin, wasn’t it Gandhi who said, ‘An eye for an eye and the whole world will be blind’?”Something like that, anyway. He had seen it on a T-shirt once, at a CND demonstration he’d policed in the eighties. Last year Julia made him go on an antiwar march. That was how far his world had turned around.

  “I’m sorry,” Martin said. “It’s very good of you to do this.”

  Jackson didn’t mind, it had all the trappings of a job, and he was doing something rather than just hanging around (although it felt very like hanging around). Close-up and personal wasn’t really his thing, but he had done bodyguard detail in his time, knew the drill.

  “Nothing’s going to happen to you on my watch, Martin,” he reassured him. Moviespeak that seemed to make Martin happy.

  Jackson wondered what “crime” Martin had committed. Parking in a bus bay? Writing crap novels?

  Martin was doing well, politely signing and smiling. Jackson gave him a thumbs-up sign of encouragement. Then he turned around, and there she was, standing next to him.

  “Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “Would you not do that?”

  He looked for the knife, just because he couldn’t see it didn’t mean that she didn’t have it. In a previous life, under a previous regime, he expected she would have been a spy (or, indeed, an assassin). Maybe she still was.

  “So, crazy Russian girl,” he said, “how’s it going?”

  She ignored him and, without any preamble, handed him a photograph. The photograph showed a girl standing against a sea-wall somewhere. “Day trip to St. Andrews,” the crazy Russian girl said. He couldn’t keep on calling her that. She had said—what had she said? “Ask for Jojo.” That sounded pretty unlikely. A working girl’s name. “What’s your real name?” he said to her. Real names had always seemed important to Jackson. “My name’s Jackson Brodie.”

  She shrugged and said, “Tatiana. Is not secret.”

  “Tatiana?” Jackson wondered if that was like “Titania.” He had seen production photographs of Julia playing the queen of the fairies in a drama-school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, barefoot, almost naked, her astonishing hair let loose and garlanded with flowers. A wild girl. He wished he had known her then.

  “Yes, Tatiana.”

  “And the girl in the photograph?”

  “Lena. She is twenty-five.” It was sunny in the photograph and the wind was blowing the girl’s hair around, tiny crucifixes just visible in her ears. His mermaid. She looked remarkably like Ta-tiana, except that her eyes were kinder. “Everyone says we look like sisters,”Tatiana said.

  Tatiana had no grasp of the past tense, Jackson realized. It kept the dead girl in a present she no longer had a place in. He thought of all the other photographs of dead girls he had looked at in his time and felt the leaden weight of melancholy drop again. Josie had album after album of photographs documenting Marlee’s existence from the moment of her birth. One day they would all be dust, or perhaps someone would find one in a flea market or a garage sale or whatever they would have in the future and feel the same sadness for an unknown, forgotten life. Tatiana nudged him in his bruised ribs with a sharp elbow and hissed, “Pay attention.”

  “What’s with the crucifixes?” he asked.

  “She bought them in jewelers, in St. James Center. Pair for her, pair for me—gift. She’s religious. Good person. Meets bad peo-ple.” She lit a cigarette and stared into the distance, as if she were looking at something that wasn’t quite visible. “Very good person.”

  At the sight of the cigarette, a boy in a Book Festival T-shirt came running toward her. She stopped him at twenty paces with a look.

  “I found her,” Jackson said. “I found your friend Lena and then I lost her.”

  “I know.” She took the photograph back from him.

  “You told me last night to mind my own business,” Jackson pointed out to her. “But now here you are.”

  “A girl can’t change mind?”

  “I take it that Terence Smith is trying to kill you because you know what happened to your friend Lena? Did he kill her?”

  Tatiana threw the cigarette on the grass. The boy in the Book Festival T-shirt, still hovering just beyond the range of her petrifying gaze, darted forward and picked up the burning stub. He looked like the kind of boy who would throw himself on a grenade to stop it from killing other people.

  “How did Terence Smith know my name?” Jackson asked.

  “He works for bad people, bad people have ways. They have connections.”

  That sounded pretty vague to Jackson’s ears. “How do I find him?”

  “I tell you already,” she said crossly. “Real Homes for Real Peo-ple.” She leaned closer to him in that rather alarming way that she had, and fixed him with her green eyes. “You’re very stupid, Mr. Brodie.”

  “Tell me about it. Did Terence Smith kill Lena?”

  “Bye, bye,” she said and waved her hand at him. He hadn’t realized until then that it was possible to wave sarcastically. And then she was gone, slipping away into the eager book-loving crowd.

  Jackson managed to wrestle Martin away from E. M. Heller’s ambiguous clutches. “She prefers Betty-May,” Martin confided in a whisper.

  “Does she?” Jackson said. He was struck by a thought. “You don’t have a car, do you, Martin?”

  Martin’s car was parked on the street outside his house where he had abandoned it the previous morning. Crime-scene tape was strung across the end of his driveway, and an assortment of police, uniform and plainclothes, could be glimpsed coming in and out of the house. Jackson wondered if he had been identified last night on the Meadows, it was unlikely but it still might be best to avoid the long arm of the law. Martin certainly seemed to feel the same, shielding his face like a common criminal with the property news-paper that Jackson had just picked up. If Martin really had been phoned by Richard Mott’s killer, then he was withholding evi-dence, and by extension Jackson was now party to that. He sighed at the thought of how many charges he was stacking up.

  He thought of Marijut in her pink uniform. “A maid, a friend, found a man who was murdered in a house we go to.” And this was the house. Favors again. They seemed to spread their tentacles every-where that Jackson went. You say connection, I say connection. What did Martin know about them?

  “Nice women,” Martin said, “good cleaners. Wear pink.”

  “How did you pay them?”

  “Cash in hand to the Housekeeper. I always leave them a tip.”

  “None of them ...how shall I put this, Martin? None of them ever offered extras?”

  “Not really. But there was a nice girl named Anna who offered to defrost the ‘fridge.’ ”

  “Right. Shall I drive?” Jackson said, feeling suddenly perky at the idea. Martin’s car was an uninspiring Vectra, but nonetheless it was four wheels and an engine.

  “No, no, it’s okay,” Martin said politely, as if he were doing Jackson a favor, for God’s sake, sliding into the driver’s seat and turning on the engine. They set off in a series of kangaroo hops.

  “Easy on the clutch there, Martin,” Jackson murmured. He hadn’t actually meant to say that out loud, nobody liked a back-seat (or, in this case, front seat) driver, or so his ex-wife had con-stantly informed him. Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them.

  “Sorry,” Martin said, nearly skinning a bicycle courier. Jackson considered wrestling the helm off Martin, but it was probably good for the guy to feel he was in control of something, however badly.

  “Where are we going, by the way?” Martin asked.

  “We’re going to buy a house.”

  43

  “We’re going to buy a house?”

  “Well, we’re going to look at houses,” Jackson said, rifling through the property newspaper. “We’re going to look at
new de-velopments. Hatter Homes, you know them?”

  “Real Homes for Real People. I looked at one but it was a bit shoddy. I don’t really like new housing estates.” He worried that Jackson might live in a new house on an estate and would be offended, but Jackson said, “Me neither. We’re not really looking to buy,” he added. Martin wondered if Jackson thought he was sim-ple. “We’re just going to pretend. I’m looking for someone. Watch out for that bus, Martin, I think it’s going to sideswipe you.”

  “Sorry.”

  “This is a lovely room, a real family room.”The woman showing them round the “Braecroft” show home hesitated. Martin supposed that he and Jackson didn’t look like a real family. The woman had a name badge that said MAGGIE and was dressed like a holiday rep in sky blue suit and multicolored cravat. Martin won-dered if he could get a name badge made—“William” or “Simon” or anything that wasn’t Martin. It could be a very easy way to change your identity.

  “Lovely,” Jackson said in a deadpan kind of way. It was a north-facing room, all the light seemed to be funneled away from it. Martin felt an ache for his own home. Was he going to move back in when the police finished with it and spend the rest of his life living with the ghost of Richard Mott? Would he be able to sell it? Perhaps he could employ “Maggie,” he imagined her showing prospective buyers around, saying brightly, “This is the living room, a lovely room, a real family room, and this is the spot where Richard Mott had his brains splattered.”

  “Of course, all sorts of people enjoy living in Hatter Homes,” “Maggie” said, “not just families. And what is a family anyway?” She frowned as if she were giving serious thought to this question. She seemed tense and overwound.

  They traipsed after her up the stairs. “Are you on a tight budget?” she inquired over her shoulder. “Because the ‘Waverley’ is more roomy and has a bigger garden, not that there’s anything wrong with the ‘Braecroft,’ of course, it’s an ingenious use of space.”

  “Deceptively small,” Jackson muttered.

  “And this is the master bedroom,” “Maggie” announced proudly, “en suite, of course.”

  Martin sat down on the bed. He wanted to lie down and go to sleep, but he supposed that wasn’t allowed.

  “Well, thank you, Maggie,” Jackson said, making his way back down the stairs, “you’ve certainly given us a lot to think about.” She seemed to droop with disappointment, sensing a lost sale.

  “Come into the Portakabin and I’ll just take a note of your name,” she said.

  Outside the light seemed harsher. The estate was in a dip between two hills and had strange acoustics, you could hear the con-stant rumble of a motorway even though you could see no cars. A pot of dusty red geraniums sat next to the door of the Portakabin, the only sign of organic life. A JCB trundled past. The estate was still a building site even though half the houses were already occupied. There were some hard chairs in the Portakabin, and Mar

  tin took a seat on one of them. He was so tired.

  “And you are?” “Maggie” said to Jackson.

  “David Lastingham,” Jackson said promptly.

  “And your partner?” she asked, looking at Martin.

  “Alex Blake,” Martin said wearily. It was his name, it belonged to him in a way that he suspected David Lastingham didn’t belong to Jackson.

  “And a contact phone number?” Jackson reeled off a number. Martin wondered if it was genuine.

  “Oh, by the way,” Jackson said casually to “Maggie,” “I’m an old acquaintance of Terry Smith’s from way back, you don’t know where I can get hold of him, do you? It would be great to catch up.”

  A look of distaste passed across “Maggie’s” face. “I’ve no idea where Terry is today.” A mobile started to ring, and she dug into her handbag and said, “Excuse me a minute,”and went outside. To Martin’s surprise Jackson leaped like a cat burglar over to the filing cabinet and started raking through it.

  “I think that’s illegal,” Martin said.

  “I think you’re right.”

  “I thought you used to be a policeman.”

  “I did.”

  These were the kinds of circumstances that made Martin feel nervous, and he stood anxiously in the doorway and watched “Maggie” pacing around as she talked into her phone. She was having to raise her voice, apparently because of a poor signal, and stopped every few seconds to say, “Are you still there?” He heard her say, “He’s in Thurso, apparently. I know, I don’t believe it ei-ther. I think he’s abandoned me, after all his promises.” Her face seemed to collapse as she talked. She finished the call and dabbed at her eyes.

  “She’s coming back!” Martin hissed at Jackson.

  By the time she walked back into the Portakabin, her mask firmly back in place, Jackson was engrossed in a brochure con-taining photographs of the various Hatter Homes on offer. “They’re all so lovely,” he said, “I don’t see how I could possibly choose.” He sighed and shook his head. He wasn’t the least bit convincing. “Anyway,” he said, turning to Martin, “back to the Batmobile, Robin.”

  “Here, I think,” Martin said, drawing to a halt in front of a pair of electronic gates that stood wide-open. They were in the Grange, at an address that Jackson had apparently stolen from Maggie’s filing cabinet. PROVIDENCE, a sign said on the gate.

  “Who lives here?” Martin asked.

  “Graham Hatter. Owner of Hatter Homes. He employs Ter-ence Smith, so I’m thinking that he might know his where-abouts.”

  “And who’s Terence Smith?”

  “It’s a long story, Martin.”

  I’ve got time, Martin thought, but he didn’t say it. Time was the only thing he did have, nanosecond after nanosecond ticking down. “I’ll just stay here while you go in.” He yawned. He won-dered if the Irn-Bru cocktail that the so-called Paul Bradley had given him had permanently affected his metabolism in some way. One minute he was so edgy he was twitching, the next he was so tired he couldn’t keep his eyes open.

  “Won’t be long,” Jackson said.

  Martin looked through his glove compartment for something to read. All he could find was a wad of flyers for Richard’s show— miniature versions of his COMIC VIAGRA FOR THE MIND poster— that he must have left in there on Tuesday.

  He closed his eyes and was just falling into a sickly doze when he suddenly heard a familiar, unmistakable tune. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up like bristles. The Robin Hood theme song wafted in through the open car window. His heart bumped against his chest wall. Richard Mott’s phone was ringing. In the street. Close by. Martin spun round looking for the source of the fugi-tive theme. A blue Honda had driven up and parked behind his own car. A blue Honda. A blue Honda? No, there were thousands of blue Hondas around, it wasn’t necessarily the one that belonged to the insane baseball-bat-wielding driver. The theme to Robin Hood started up again. Martin opened the door and stumbled out of his car. There was no sign of anyone. Then he spotted him, walking up the driveway of the Hatters’ house, the phone to his ear. It really was the Honda driver from Tuesday. The Honda driver had Richard Mott’s phone. How could that be, unless he had killed Richard Mott? And why would he kill Richard Mott— unless it was the Honda driver who had picked up his laptop, found his address, and come to Merchiston to kill Martin. Martin felt as if the blood had just left his body.

  Martin was expecting him to ring the doorbell and announce himself in the usual way, but instead the Honda driver crossed the lawn and stood in front of the French windows. He finished his call and produced the baseball bat, again out of nowhere. He raised it high as if he were preparing to hit for the outfield, but instead he smashed it into the glass of the windows.

  44

  This was the deal. When Celine Dion had sung her lungs out, when Tatiana had eaten her way through the fruit bowl, she reached into her bra, conjured out a Memory Stick, and said, “Do you know what this is, Gloria?”

  “A Memory Stick, I believe,” Gloria said.

/>   “Whose Memory Stick, Gloria? Whose?”

  “Yours?” Gloria hazarded, wondering if she was being subjected to some form of Slavic Socratic irony. “I know it’s not mine,” she added.

  Tatiana handed her the Memory Stick and said, “No, it’s ours, Gloria. You share with me, fifty-fifty.”

  “Share what?”

  “Everything.”

  The Magus’ book. Graham’s secret accounts, all contained on one tiny tablet of plastic that Tatiana had taken from the pocket of Graham’s summer-weight wool, as he lay flapping like a fish on his Apex bed.

  “I thought you tried to resuscitate him,” Gloria said thought-fully. Tatiana made a sad clown face. “Don’t,” Gloria said with a shudder.

  There had been something on the radio this morning about horses. Someone had left dozens of horses locked up in a stable and gone away and all the horses had starved to death. Gloria thought about the big brown eyes of horses, she thought about Black Beauty, the saddest book ever written. She thought about all the horses with sad brown eyes you could help if you had a lot of money. The headless kittens, the Sellotaped budgies, the mangled boys.

  “Hm,” she said.

  Gloria gazed thoughtfully at her screen saver of border collie puppies for a while and then tapped the space bar and brought her computer back to life. She typed in “Ozymandias” and, just like that, she entered into Graham’s occult books.

  “How did you know the password?” she asked Tatiana.

  “I know everything.” Gloria could think of a lot of things that Tatiana probably didn’t know (how to make scones, the whereabouts of the Scilly Isles, the terror of aging) but didn’t bother challenging her. She was oddly touched that Graham had used the title of the Shelley poem for his password. Perhaps he had, after all, appreciated the gift she had given him. Or perhaps he was just looking for the most obscure word he could find.