One Good Turn

by Kate Atkinson

  “What? It’s half-past five in the morning. It’s still yesterday, for fuck’s sake.”

  “Not for you,” the man on the doorstep said, pushing him roughly inside. “For you it’s tomorrow.”

  “What the—?” Richard Mott said as the man shoved him into the living room.

  The guy was huge, his nose swollen and ugly, as if he’d been in a fight. He was very nasal, English, a bit of something flat, Nottingham, Lancaster, perhaps. Richard Mott imagined himself giving a description afterward to the police, imagined himself saying, “I know accents, I’m in the business.”He had tried his hand at acting in the early nineties, there’d been a bit part on The Bill where he’d played a guy (a comic so he wouldn’t have to “stretch” him-self) with a crazy female stalker who wanted to kill him, and one of the Sun Hill detectives counseled his character that to be a survivor you had to think like a survivor, you had to picture yourself in the future, after the attack. This advice came back to him now, but then he remembered that his character had actually been killed by the crazy stalker.

  The insane stranger was wearing driving gloves, and Richard thought this probably wasn’t a good sign. The gloves had holes from which the guy’s knuckles protruded, little atolls of white flesh, and Richard thought there was a joke in there somewhere, perhaps you could reference those classic yob knuckle-tattoos “love” and “hate,” but try as he could he couldn’t render this thought into anything remotely coherent, let alone funny. From nowhere the guy produced a baseball bat.

  What followed ought to be in slow motion, no sound, a music track instead—Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” or perhaps something poignant and classical—the cello—Martin would know. Richard Mott’s legs buckled suddenly and he fell to his knees. He’d never experienced that before, you heard talk about it but you didn’t think it happened.

  “That’s good,” the man said, “get down on the floor where you belong.”

  “What do you want?” His mouth was so dry he could hardly speak. “Take anything, everything. Take everything in the house.” Richard Mott flipped desperately through a mental inventory of everything in Martin’s house. There was a good stereo, a fantastic wide-screen TV over in the corner behind him. He tried to gesture with a nerveless arm in the direction of the television, spotted Martin’s Rolex on his wrist, tried to bring it to the man’s attention.

  “I don’t want anything,” the man said (quite calmly, his calmness was the worst thing).

  Richard’s phone rang, breaking the strange, intense intimacy between them. They both stared at it, sitting on the coffee table, a bizarre intrusion from outside. Richard Mott tried to calculate whether or not he could reach for it, flip it open, shout down the line to whoever was phoning him at this hour, “Help me, I’m with a crazy guy,” prove he wasn’t joking, give the address (like someone in a movie, a sudden remembered image of Jodie Foster in Panic Room), but he knew it was no good, before he could even touch the phone, the crazy guy would have brought his baseball bat down on his arm. He couldn’t even bear thinking about the kind of pain the crazy guy could inflict. He started whimpering, he could hear himself, like a dog. Jodie Foster was made of sterner stuff, she wouldn’t whimper.

  The phone stopped ringing and the crazy guy pocketed it, laughing, taking up the Robin Hood theme song where the phone had left off. “Bunch of faggots if you ask me,” he said to Richard. “Don’t you think?” Richard felt a warm trickle of urine working its way down his thigh. “I didn’t like what you did today.”

  “The show?” Richard said in disbelief. “You’re here because you didn’t like the show?”

  “Is that what you call it?”

  “I don’t understand. I’ve never met you before. Have I?” He had gone through his life indifferent to whether or not he offended people, it struck him now that maybe he should have taken more care.

  “Stay down on your knees and face me.”

  “Do you want me to suck your cock?” Richard offered desper-ately, trying to make himself sound eager despite his cotton-mouth, despite the warm stain on his boxers. He wondered what he would do to save himself from being hurt by this man. Proba-bly anything.

  “You filthy bastard,” the man said. (Okay, he’d read that one wrong.) “I don’t want you to do anything, Martin. Just shut the fuck up, why don’t you?”

  Richard Mott opened his mouth to say that he wasn’t Martin, that Martin was asleep upstairs in his room and he would very happily show him the way so he could hurt Martin instead of himself, but all he managed was to croak, “I’m a comedian,” and the man threw back his head and laughed, his mouth open so wide that Richard Mott could see the fillings in his back teeth. He felt a sob break in his throat.

  “Oh you fucking are, there’s no doubt about that,” the guy said, and then quickly, quicker than in Richard Mott’s imagination, he

  brought the bat down, and Richard Mott’s world exploded into pieces of light—little filaments, like in old-fashioned lightbulbs— and he realized he had told his last joke. He could have sworn he heard applause, and then all the little filaments burned out one by one until there was only darkness, and Richard Mott floated into it.

  His last thoughts were about his obituary. Who would write it? Would it be good?

  17

  Jackson woke in the tailspin of a nightmare. Someone, a shadowy figure he didn’t recognize, had handed him a package. Jackson knew that the package was very precious, and if he dropped it something unspeakably awful would happen. The package was too heavy and awkward, though, it had no fixed center of gravity and seemed to move around in his arms so that no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t hold on to it. He woke up with a start of horror at the moment that he knew the package was about to slip out of his arms forever.

  He hauled himself up and sat on the edge of what passed for a bed. He felt dog-rough, as if his body had been fed through a giant mangle during the course of the night, and his eyes seemed to have been poached—or possibly fried—while he slept. His ribs ached and his hand was throbbing, it had swollen up nicely, the imprint of a boot clearly visible on it.

  The seawater that had sluiced through his body yesterday had diluted his blood, and it was going to require gallons of hot, strong coffee to restore its viscosity, to restore Jackson to some semblance of life. He wondered what kind of toxins and pollutants swam around in the water. And sewage, what about sewage? Best not to think about that.

  He remembered the dead woman—not that he was about to forget her—and wondered if she had washed up somewhere overnight.

  If he was in France he would be going for a swim in his piscine round about now. But he wasn’t in France, he was in a holding cell at St. Leonard’s Police Station in Edinburgh.

  He had never been in a jail cell before. He had put people in them, and taken people out of them, but he had never actually been locked in one himself. Nor had he journeyed from a holding cell to the Sheriff Court in the back of a Black Maria, which was like traveling in something that was a cross between a public convenience and what he imagined a horse box would be like. Nor had he been up before a court on the wrong side of the rails, and he had certainly never before been pronounced “guilty” and fined a hundred pounds for assault and gone from being an up-standing citizen to a convicted felon in the slow blink of the reptilian eye of the sheriff. From moment to moment the novelty just grew. He remembered thinking when Louise Monroe was ques-tioning him that it was interesting to be on the other side. “Inter-esting”—there was that word, he had obviously activated the Chinese curse yesterday.

  When he came out of the court, he phoned Julia on her mo-bile to tell her he was a free man again. He’d expected to get her voice mail, he thought he remembered her saying that she had a preview at eleven—but she answered, sounding sleepy as if he’d woken her up. “Oh, gosh, sweetie, are you okay?”This morning there was genuine and touching concern for his welfare in her voice, whereas last night there had been un-Julia-like defeat when he phone
d to tell her what had happened.

  “Arrested? What a wag you are, Jackson,” she had sighed.

  “No, really—arrested and charged,” he said. Wag? What kind of a word was that?

  “For brawling?”

  “I believe the technical term is ‘assault.’ I’m up before the sher-iff in the morning, I have to stay in jail overnight.”

  “For God’s sake, Jackson, do you have to go looking for trou-ble?”

  “I didn’t go looking for it, it found me all of its own accord. Are you going to ask me if I’m all right?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Well, my hand hurts like hell, and I’m wondering if I’ve got at least one cracked rib.”

  “Well, that’s what happens when you go in for tomfoolery.”

  Tomfoolery? His predicament seemed to have brought out the (even more) bizarre elements of her vocabulary. He thought she would be sympathetic, but she had more or less put the phone down on him, although he supposed he had woken her up in what was the middle of the night by the time he’d been charged and processed. He thought that perhaps she might have left him a nice message on his phone while it waited for him, with his other belongings, but there was nothing.

  He knew that whatever happened he mustn’t mention the dog to Julia.

  “You killed a dog, Jackson?”

  “No! The dog just died, I didn’t kill it.”

  “You killed it with the power of your thoughts?”

  “No! It had a heart attack, or a stroke, maybe, I’m not sure.” He heard Julia light up a cigarette and drag hard on it. Her accordion lungs going in and out, wheezing their sickly tune.

  He had watched in paralyzed horror as the snarling dog had lumbered toward him, like an overweight gymnast going for the vaulting horse, and thought, Holy Mother of God, because divine intervention seemed the only thing that could rescue him. He steadied himself, reminded himself of the drill, Grab its legs, pull it apart, and, lo and behold, the Virgin Mary herself must have interceded on his behalf, because just as the furious beast reached him, it dropped at his feet like a balloon that had been pricked. Jackson stared at it in dumbfounded astonishment, waiting for it to pull itself together and carry on ripping him apart with its teeth, but there wasn’t even a twitch in its tail left. Honda Man roared with some horrible inner dog-loving pain and fell to his knees next to the animal, and even though the guy was a crazy, enraged psychopath, Jackson couldn’t help but feel a twinge of sympathy for someone in the throes of so much grief.

  He scratched his head, Stan to Honda Man’s Ollie, and wondered what to do. Running seemed like a good option, but somehow it didn’t seem right to just walk away. Before he could decide on the right course of action—kill Honda Man or comfort him— a policeman arrived on the scene. They may have been in a dark backwater of an alley, but they were close to the Royal Mile and had been making enough noise to wake poor old Greyfriar’s Bobby, sleeping the big sleep no more than a stick’s throw away. So shouting did work, he must remember to emphasize this fact to Marlee. And Julia.

  Jackson supposed that, through a policeman’s eye, it didn’t look good—Honda Man on the ground, his nose a mashed-up mess, sobbing over his dead dog, Jackson standing over them both, scratching his head in bemusement, his mouth almost dripping with blood that wasn’t his own. Perhaps he should have just put his hands up and said, “It’s a fair cop, you’ve got me bang to rights, officer,” but he didn’t, he protested a great deal (“It was self-defense, he attacked me, he’s insane”) and ended up being cuffed and forced into the back of a squad car.

  His appearance in court this morning had been swift and bru-tal. The arresting officer read out a statement to the effect that he had come across “Mr. Terence Smith” on the ground in a pool of blood, sobbing over the body of his dog. The victim accused the defendant of killing the dog, but there were no visible marks on the dog. The defendant appeared to have bitten Mr. Smith’s nose.

  “Mr. Smith” himself made an almost credible victim—sharp-suited in Hugo Boss, his nose purple and swollen in a way that clearly incriminated Jackson. He had been a man going about his own business, walking his dog. Walking his dog—was there any more innocent pastime that a citizen could indulge in?

  Jackson had refused to see the police doctor last night, claiming he was “fine.” It was stupid male pride that made him reluctant to admit to injury. “You are a visitor in our city, Mr. Brodie,” Sher-iff Alistair Crichton admonished him, “and I am only sorry that this isn’t the good old days when you would have been run out of town.” Instead he fined him a hundred pounds for assault and told him to “watch his step.”

  “Why didn’t you plead ‘not guilty’?” Julia asked. “You’re an idiot, Jackson.” She no longer sounded sleepy, quite the opposite in fact.

  “Thanks for the sympathy.”

  “And so, what now?” she asked.

  “Dunno. Guess I’ll try to go straight from now on.”

  “It’s not funny.”

  “Unless you like the idea of being a gangster’s moll.”

  “It’s not funny.”

  Jackson could hear a door opening and closing and then voices in the background. A man asked a question that Jackson couldn’t catch, and Julia turned her mouth away from the phone and said, “Yes, please.”

  “Are you in a shop?”

  “No, I’m in rehearsal. I have to go, I’ll see you later.” And she was gone. She couldn’t be in rehearsal, her venue was so far under-ground that no phone signal could penetrate the rock. Jackson sighed. Hard times in Babylon.

  18

  Louise had to spend twenty minutes waking Archie up, if she didn’t put the effort in he would still be in his bed when she came home from work. He had been in the shower for almost half an hour, she wouldn’t be surprised if he’d fallen asleep again in there, he certainly never seemed any cleaner when he came out. She didn’t like to think what other things he might be doing in there with his man/boy body. It was hard to remember that he had once been brand-new, as pink and unsullied as Jellybean’s paw-pads when he was a kitten. Now he sprouted hair and stubble, erupted in spots, his voice was on a roller coaster, swooping and plummeting at random. He was undergoing some kind of unnatural transformation, as if he were changing from a boy into an animal, more werewolf than boy.

  It was almost impossible to believe now that Archie had come out of her own body, she couldn’t see how he had ever fitted in there. Eve was made from Adam’s body, but in reality men came from inside women—no wonder it did their heads in. Man that is born of woman and is but of few days and is full of trouble. Sometimes you wondered why anyone bothered crawling out of the cradle when what lay ahead was so darn difficult. She shouldn’t think like that, depressive mothers produced depressive children (she had read a clinical study), she had thought that she could be the one to break the cycle, but she hadn’t done a very good job.

  She drank coffee and glared at the urn that was still sitting on the draining board. Woman is born of woman. Perhaps she could just scatter the contents in the garden like fertilizer. There was hardly any topsoil out there—thank you, Graham Hatter—so for the first time in her life her mother could perform a useful func-tion. She realized she had bit her lip until it had bled. She liked the taste of her own blood, salty and ferric. She was sure she had read somewhere that there was salt in the blood because all life began in the sea, but she found it hard to believe. It seemed po-etic rather than scientific. She thought of an embryonic Archie, more fish than fowl, curled in his watery environment, tumbling like a sea horse inside her.

  She sighed. She couldn’t deal with her mother yet. “I’ll think about it tomorrow,” she murmured. The ghost of Scarlett passed through her, and she acknowledged her with a little salute. Good to see you, Ms. O’Hara.

  It could have been the first murder case on which she was se-nior officer in charge, and instead it was turning out to be a mirage. The divers had gone in at first light and found n
othing. She’d sent Sandy Mathieson out there to cover for her. Somehow she had known the divers wouldn’t come up with anything. She would probably get hauled over the coals for wasting money and resources. She would like the dead woman to turn up, not because she wanted a woman dead but because she would like to prove that she wasn’t a figment of Jackson Brodie’s imagination. She wanted to justify Jackson. The justified sinner. Was he a sinner? Wasn’t everyone?

  Yesterday, Jessica Drummond had checked his credentials with the Cambridge police. Yes, he used to be a detective inspector with them, but he had left a few years ago to set up as a private investigator. “A gumshoe, a private dick,” Jessica snorted (she really did snort). “Boy’s Own fantasy stuff.”

  Eager beaver, Louise had heard Jessica called. She was trying so hard to become one of the boys that she looked as if she might have started shaving. Compared to her, Louise felt like a great big puffy pink marshmallow of womanhood.

  Worse, Jessica went on, Brodie had inherited money from a client and buggered off to retire in France.

  “How much money?” Louise asked.

  “Two million.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “No.Two million pounds from a very old lady. You can’t help but wonder how much coercion that involved. Confused old lady changes her will in favor of some sweet talker. I think there’s something wrong with our Mr. Brodie.” She tapped her forehead. “You know, an elaborate hoaxer, misses being a policeman, having a real job, sets about making himself the center of attention. A fantasist.”