One Good Turn

by Kate Atkinson

  He had a set of Russian dolls, matryoshka, the expensive kind. The tourist shops in Prague were full of Russian dolls these days. The writer’s dolls were lined up on the windowsill, she dusted them every week, sometimes she put them inside one another, playing with them as she had with her own set when she was a child. She used to think they were eating one another. Her ma-tryoshka had been cheap, crudely painted in primary colors, but the dolls that belonged to the writer were beautiful, painted by a real artist with scenes from Pushkin, so many artists in Russia with no jobs now, painting boxes and dolls and eggs, anything for tourists. The writer had a fifteen-doll set! How she would have loved that when she was a girl. Now, of course, she had put away childish things. She wondered if the writer was gay. A lot of gay men in Edinburgh.

  There was a shelf of his books in his study, a lot of them in for-eign languages, even in Czech! She had glanced through them, they were about a girl named Nina Riley who was a private de-tective. Put the gun down, Lord Hunterston! I know what happened out on the grouse shoot. Davy’s death was no accident. Shite, as her Scottish boyfriend would have said. They referred to the writer as “Mr. Canning,” but that was not the name on his books, on the books he was “Alex Blake.”

  All nice as it was every time. Scented roses from the garden in a bowl on a table in the hall. He always left ten pounds extra, tucked under the bowl, a generous man. Must be very rich. No ten-pound note today, not like him. The dining room unused, as usual. She opened the door to the living room. The curtains were closed, which they never were. It felt gloomy, as if there were a fog in the room. Even in the half-light she could tell that something bad had happened. She picked her way across the carpet, and glass crunched underfoot as if a bomb had gone off. She opened the curtains and sunlight poured in, illuminating the mess—the mirror above the fireplace, all the ornaments, even the pretty glass shades in the antique light fitting, all smashed to splinters and shards. A coffee table turned over, a table lamp lying on the floor, its yellow silk shade bent and broken. Everything upside down, as if elephants had passed through the room. Really clumsy elephants. The writer’s matryoshka dolls were scattered everywhere, little skittles knocked flying. She picked one up without thinking and put it in the pocket of her jacket, feeling the smooth, round, satisfying shape of it.

  Sophia had a funny feeling in her stomach, like when something very exciting was going to happen, something that had never happened before. Like the time she watched a huge block of flats being demolished. Boom! And a great cloud of thick gray dust, like a volcano erupting, like the Twin Towers coming down, only it was before the Twin Towers.

  Then she cried out, “Oh, God, oh my God,” in her own lan-guage. She made the sign of the cross even though she wasn’t religious and said, “Oh my God,”again. They seemed to be the only words she could remember. The sight of the man on the floor had temporarily eradicated the entire database of Sophia’s vocabulary, English and Czech.

  She was a scientist, really, not a cleaner, she reminded herself, she should be able to observe dispassionately, objectively. She forced herself to move closer. The man, it must be the writer, was lying on the floor as if he had toppled over backward while at prayer. It looked like an uncomfortable position, but he probably didn’t care too much anymore. His head all caved in, an eye popped out. Brain everywhere like Scottish porridge. Blood. A lot of blood, soaked into the red carpet so she hadn’t seen it at first. Blood on the red-painted walls, blood on the red velvet sofas. It was like a room that had been waiting for a murder, waiting to ab-sorb it into its walls like a sponge.

  She was getting used to looking at him now.Words were coming back as well—English words—she realized she could shout “Help!” or “Murder!” but now that she’d got over the shock, that seemed a little bit stupid, so she walked quietly back through the house and out the front door and into the street, where she found the House-keeper still unloading plastic buckets and mops from the back of the pink van and informed her that the writer’s house wasn’t going to be cleaned anytime today.

  20

  “Iheard you killed a dog. You look like shit. Want to grab a coffee?”

  Louise Monroe. Louise Monroe grinning at him and pointing across the road to the Royal Museum opposite the Sheriff Court.

  “Fraternizing with the enemy?”

  “They’ve got a good café in there,” she said. She scrubbed up nicely—black suit, white shirt, heels. Yesterday she had been in jeans and a T-shirt, a suede jacket. He liked her best in jeans, but the suit was nice. She had good ankles, “turned on a lathe,” his brother would have said. Jackson was a bit of an ankle man. He liked all the other bits that went into the making of a woman, but he particularly appreciated a good pair of ankles. It was the bad Jackson, obviously, who was thinking about Louise Monroe’s an-kles, the evil doppelg㭧er who lay in ambush within his brain. Good Jackson, Bad Jackson. The pair of them seemed to be having quite a tussle these days. Jackson didn’t like to think what would happen if Bad Jackson won. Had Dr. Jekyll won over Mr. Hyde? Which one was good and which one was bad? He had no idea, he’d never read the book, only seen that Mary Reilly movie, half of it anyway, on video—Josie’s choice—before falling into a postpizza sleep on the sofa.

  “I didn’t kill the dog,” Jackson said. “It just died. Dogs do die of natural causes, despite what everyone thinks. I take it you

  haven’t found her, then? The dead girl?”

  “No, sorry.”

  “Not yet” would have been a better answer. She said “sorry” as if looking for the dead girl had been a personal favor to him rather than a police case. Jackson suddenly caught sight of Terence Smith leaving the Sheriff Court, a phone glued to his ear. “Hey, you,” Jackson shouted, starting after him. Louise Monroe caught his sleeve and held him back, saying, “Easy, tiger, you don’t want to end up straight back in court.” Terence Smith gave him a two-finger salute and stepped into a taxi.

  “Lying bastard,” Jackson muttered.

  “That’s what they all say.”

  “So you pleaded guilty even though you were innocent?” Louise Monroe mused over a latte while Jackson downed a triple espresso like medicine. “You must be a Catholic.”

  “My mother was Irish,” Jackson said. “She was very religious, I was a disappointment to her.” “I’m a Scottish Catholic, that’s a double whammy—all the same crap but a chip welded on the shoulder as well.” “And were you a disappointment to your mother?” Jackson asked.

  “No. She was a disappointment to me.”

  “It just seemed easier to plead guilty.”

  “And that makes perfect sense where you come from, Mr. Brodie, in Topsy-Turvy Land?”

  Mr. Brodie. That’s how Julia used to address him, in the early days, making his surname suggestive and intimate as if he were a character in a Regency romance. Now she said “Jackson” sharply, like someone who knew him too well.

  “I just thought it would be quicker, rather than going to trial and having to come back, get a solicitor, all that rigmarole. I had no witnesses, the guy was injured, and I never mentioned my own injuries when I was charged.” He held out his hand for her to see, deciding against lifting his shirt and displaying his other purple trophies in the genteel environment of the museum. “My sword hand,” he said ruefully.

  “He stamped on your hand?” she asked. “When you were on the ground? And you didn’t plead self-defense? You’re an idiot.”

  “So I’m told.”

  “You’re an ex-policeman, a man of previously good character, it’s your first offense.”

  “I’ve crossed over to the dark side.”

  “Why?”

  “I wanted to know what it was like.”

  “And?”

  “Dark.” He sighed and winced at the pain in his ribs. He had enough of this conversation. “What about Favors?” he asked. “Find anything?”

  “I put Jessica on to it yesterday. There’s no entry in the phone book for them—”r />
  “Surprise, surprise.”

  “Nothing at Companies House, no e-mail address, no Web site, and thousands of Internet hits for everything ranging from dog-walking to hard-core porn, although none that’s obviously Edinburgh-based. Vice say they’d never heard of a sauna called Fa-vors, ditto a lap-dancing club.”

  “You should look for the pink cards—phone boxes, toilets, pubs, clubs.” Jackson began to feel something he hadn’t felt for a while, for a moment he couldn’t identify it, and then he realized what it was—he was working a case—all the excitement of trying to put something together, of trying to get somewhere. (“Let’s face it, Jackson,you feel unmanned.”) “Have you asked the girls on the street?”

  She said, “I can see your police antennae waving. Put them away.”

  She had bitten her lip so that it had bled, he could see a scar or a scab, indicating it was a habit. She looked so in control, yet the whole drawing-your-own-blood thing hinted at all kinds of inner neuroses. He thought of the snake eating its own tail, devouring itself. He wondered what she’d been doing at the Sheriff Court. He didn’t ask, instead he said, “The man who attacked me last night, Terence Smith, aka Honda Man, was involved in a road-rage incident yesterday. He was a maniac, completely out of con-trol. Viking berserkers come to mind.”

  “You saw it? What are you, some kind of professional witness, traveling around looking for crime scenes?”

  “No, I’m cursed.”

  She laughed and said, “Who cursed you?” and he said, “I think I did it to myself.” Because he was an idiot obviously. She looked like a different person when she laughed.

  “I saw him take a baseball bat to someone in the street, and a few hours later the guy has a go at me, threatening me, telling me to keep my mouth shut about what I saw. He knew my name. How could he know that?”

  “So you were the only witness to this road rage?”

  “No,” Jackson said, “there were dozens of other witnesses. He didn’t see me, and he had much more reason to go after the guy who stopped him—some guy threw a briefcase at him. Maybe he’s warned him off as well.”

  “Or maybe he was just a run-of-the-mill mugger and you imagined him threatening you.”

  “Imagined?”The way she’d been listening to him he’d thought she believed him. He felt suddenly let down.

  “Look at the evidence,” she said. “You say you witnessed a road-rage incident, you claim the alleged perpetrator of the inci-dent then assaulted you—although you yourself pleaded guilty to assaulting him—you claim you found a dead body, but there is no evidence to support that claim. You’re a millionaire, but you’re

  hanging around finding trouble in all the wrong places. Let’s face it, Jackson, on paper you just don’t look good.”

  The unexpected use of his first name took him more by surprise than the reference to his personal circumstances, but then of course she would have run a background check on him. She wasn’t the stupid one here, he was the one with the bruises and the crim-inal conviction. He said, “You’ve got blood on your lip.”

  21

  Martin was woken by the dawn chorus. Even with his brain furred by sleep, it struck him as unlikely, the Four Clans was the kind of place where no birds sang, and sure enough, after a while he realized it was actually his mobile rather than an avian choir.

  He fumbled for his spectacles, knocking the phone to the floor as he did so. Even with his spectacles on, he felt as if his eyes had been smeared with Vaseline. By the time he had recovered it, the phone had ceased chirping. He peered at the screen—1 missed call. He went into the phone’s call registry. Richard Mott. Richard was probably wondering what had happened to him last night, although he wasn’t exactly the type who would care. He probably wanted the loan of something.

  He put the phone down on the bedside table and found him-self looking at a woman being burned at the stake. Her mouth was open in a gulping howl of oval as the flames from the piles of wood surrounding her began to catch at her body. It was a print of a woodcut hanging on the wall. OLD EDINBURGH, a label beneath it declared. When they drained the Nor Loch to make Princes Street Gardens, they discovered it was not just the reposi-tory of the town’s sewage and refuse but also the final resting place of the town’s witches—their trussed-up skeletons tied thumbs-to-toes like birds ready for roasting. And those were the innocent ones, the ones who sank. Martin had never understood that—you would think that innocence would be an airy substance that would make you float, that evil would be heavy, sinking you to the bottom to the slimy, stinking mud.

  Now, on the site of the witch burnings, there was an expensive restaurant where the cream of the Edinburgh bourgeoisie dined. That was what the world was like, things improved but they didn’t get better.

  Martin’s neck ached, and his limbs felt as if they’d been tied up in knots all night, as if he himself had been trussed. He was in the bed, but he had no recollection of lying down next to Paul Bradley. No recollection of removing his spectacles or his shoes. He was relieved that he was still fully dressed. The smell of frying bacon penetrated the room and made him feel sick. He peered at the digital clock on the radio next to the bed—twelve o’clock, he couldn’t believe he’d slept so long. Of Paul Bradley there was no sign—no holdall, no jacket, nothing—the man might never have existed. He remembered the gun, and his heart gave a little flip. He had spent the night in a hotel room (in the same bed!) with a complete stranger and a gun. An assassin.

  He unfolded his body cautiously and lowered his legs to the floor. A spasm in his lower back stopped him, and he had to wait for it to pass before he could stand up and wobble on jelly legs to the bathroom. The inside of his mouth felt like cardboard and his head seemed enormous, too heavy for the stalk of his neck. He felt as if he’d been given an anaesthetic, and for one paranoid mo-ment his heartbeat spiked as he wondered if Paul Bradley had been part of some complex scam to harvest organs off innocent by-standers. Or carbon-monoxide poisoning? The beginning of the famous summer “flu” or the end of an Irn-Bru hangover?

  He slaked an outrageous thirst with chemical-tasting water from the tap and checked himself in the bathroom mirror, but he couldn’t find any visible operation scars. Rohypnol? Date rape? (Surely he would know?) Something had happened to him, but he had no idea what. Had he been given some mind-altering drug that was making him mad? But why would anyone want to do that? Unless it was the gods who were going to destroy him next. They had bided their time, it was more than a year since Russia, since the incident.

  The last day, their guide, Mariya, had let them loose in a market somewhere behind Nevsky Prospekt, where there was stall after stall displaying tourist wares—nesting Russian dolls, lacquered boxes, painted eggs, Communist memorabilia, and fur hats deco-rated with Red Army badges. But mostly there were dolls, thou-sands of dolls, legions upon legions of matryoshka, not just the ones you could see but also the ones you couldn’t—dolls within dolls, endlessly replicating and diminishing, like an infinite series of mirrors. Martin imagined writing a story, a Borges-like construction where each story contained the kernel of the next and so on. Not Nina Riley, obviously—linear narratives were as much as she could cope with—but rather something with intellectual cachet (something good).

  Martin had never given matryoshka much thought before, but here in St. Petersburg their ranks seemed omnipresent and un-avoidable. His fellow travelers on the tour, overnight connoisseurs of Russian folk art, chatted all the time about which kind they were going to buy to take home. They speculated about how much doll they were going to get for their ruble, and the general feeling was that the Russians were out to rip them off but that they would do everything they could to rip the Russians off in return. “They’ve embraced capitalism,” one man said, “so they can take the bloody consequences.” Martin couldn’t tell if “bloody” was being used as an expletive or merely a descriptive. Martin had noticed before on these kinds of trips that they tended to gener-ate a good deal of xenophobi
a, so that even when experiencing and enjoying the Wonders of Prague or the Beauties of Bordeaux, the tourists regarded the inhabitants of those places as hostile mis-creants, the tourists being little Britishers fighting a permanent rearguard action.

  The shop in the foyer of their cockroach-infested hotel—hot, brightly lit, its walls mirrored with glass—sold dolls with inflated price tags attached. No one ever bought anything in the shop, and Martin spent an evening hour in there, browsing beneath the disappointed eye of the woman in charge (“Just looking,” he mur-mured apologetically), studying, evaluating, and comparing dolls in readiness for the reality of a raw retail transaction out on the streets of St. Petersburg. There were big ones and small ones, tall ones and squat ones, but the features always seemed to be the same, little pouty rosebud mouths and big blue eyes, with eyelids fixed open in a permanent stare of sex-doll horror.

  There were also dolls in the shape of cats, dogs, frogs, there were American presidents and Soviet leaders, there were five-doll sets and fifty-doll sets, there were cosmonauts and clowns, there were crudely made dolls and ones that had been exquisitely painted by real artists. By the time he left the hotel shop, Martin felt dizzy, his eyes swimming with endless reflections of dolls’ faces, and when he went to his narrow, uncomfortable bed, he dreamed he was being watched by a giant Masonic eye in the sky that turned into the eye painted at the bottom of his grandmother’s chamber pot, with its prurient inscription, WHAT I SEE I’LL NEVER TELL. He woke up in a sweat, he hadn’t thought about his grandmother—let alone her chamber pot—in years. She had been born in a Victorian century and had never really left it, her working-class Fountainbridge ten-ement a dark and gloomy space draped with chenille and musty velvet. She died a very long time ago, and Martin was surprised that he remembered anything about her at all.