One Good Turn

by Kate Atkinson

  The constable muttered something into the radio on his shoul-der and said to Martin, “Can I have your name, sir?”

  “Martin, Martin Canning,” Martin said. “I live here,” he added and thought perhaps he should have mentioned that earlier in the conversation.

  “Do you have any identification on you, sir?”

  “No,” Martin said, “my wallet was stolen last night.” It didn’t even sound convincing to his own ears.

  “Have you reported the theft, sir?”

  “Not yet.”On Leith Walk he had turned his pockets out and found four pounds and seventy-one pence. He offered to write an IOU for the rest, a proposition that was greeted with hilarity. Martin, who believed everyone should be treated as if he were honest until he proved himself otherwise (a policy that frequently left him fleeced), felt surprisingly pained that no one would afford him the same grace. In the end the only thing he could think of was to phone his agent, Melanie, and ask her to pay with her credit card.

  The policeman on guard outside his house gave him a long, level look and muttered something else into his radio.

  An old woman walked by slowly with an equally old-looking Labrador. Martin recognized the dog rather than the woman as a neighbor. Dog and woman lingered by the gateway. Martin realized there were several people on the other side of the road— neighbors, he supposed, passersby, a couple of workmen on their lunch break—who were all loitering in the same way, he was reminded for a moment of the spectators yesterday at Paul Bradley’s bloody street theater.

  The old woman with the Labrador touched Martin on the arm as if they were old acquaintances. “Isn’t it terrible?” she said. “Who would have thought, it’s so quiet around here.” Martin rubbed the moth-eaten dog’s head behind its ears. It stood foursquare, immo-bile, only a faint quiver in the tail indicating enjoyment. The dog reminded him of the push-along dogs on wheels that children played with. He and his brother, Christopher, had one when they were little, some sort of generic terrier. Their father tripped over it one day and was so enraged that he picked it up by the handle and flung it as hard as he could, through the living room window. That was regarded as acceptable behavior in their home. Not home—“home front” was what their father called it. That had been a dress rehearsal for his throwing their real dog, a mongrel, through the window of the living room in married quarters in Germany. The toy dog survived, the real dog didn’t. Martin remembered throwing his laptop yesterday, was there something in him that had enjoyed that aggressive moment? Something, God forbid, of his father in him?

  “And to think, no one heard a thing,” the old woman with the Labrador said.

  “Heard what? What happened?”Martin asked her, glancing at the policeman, wondering if he was allowed to ask, if there wasn’t some great secret here that he wasn’t allowed access to. Perhaps they’d discovered Richard was a terrorist—unlikely, given his complete lack of interest in anything that wasn’t Richard Mott. Richard! Had something happened to Richard? “Richard Mott,” he said to the police-man, “the comedian, he was staying with me, has something happened to him?”The constable frowned at him and spoke into his radio again, more urgently this time, then he said to the woman with the Labrador, “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to move away, madam.”

  Instead of moving away, the old woman shuffled closer to Martin and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “Alex Blake, the crime writer—he’s been murdered.”

  “I’m Alex Blake,” Martin said.

  “I thought you were Martin Canning, sir?” the policeman objected.

  “I am,” Martin said, but he could hear the lack of conviction in his voice.

  An earnest man introduced himself to Martin as “Superintendent Robert Campbell” and walked through the house with him as if he were an estate agent trying to sell a particularly troublesome property. Someone gave Martin what looked like paper shower caps to put over his shoes (“Still an active crime scene, sir”), and Su-perintendent Campbell murmured softly, “Tread carefully, sir,” as if he were about to quote Yeats.

  In the shambles of the living room, Martin glimpsed a couple of crime-scene technicians still at work—studious and unremark-able people, not glamorous and good-looking like the characters on CSI. There were no technicians of any kind in Martin’s nov-els, crimes were solved by intuition and coincidence and sudden hunches. Nina Riley occasionally resorted to asking advice from an old friend of her uncle’s, a self-styled “retired criminologist.” “Oh, dear old Samuel, what would a poor girl do without a brilliant mind like yours to call on?” Martin had no real idea what “criminologist” meant, but it covered a lot of gaps in Nina Riley’s education.

  The criminologist lived, in fact, in Edinburgh, and Nina had just been to visit him in his house near the Botanics. She was currently on page one hundred fifty, on her way back to the Black Isle, hanging from the Forth Bridge while the Edinburgh-to-Dundee train “thundered like a dragon” above her. Did dragons thunder? “Well, Bertie, this is quite a scrape we’ve got ourselves into here, isn’t it? Thank goodness that wasn’t the King’s Cross-to-Inverness express train, that’s all I can say!” From his living room there drifted the scent of offal. Was Richard still in there? Martin twitched, he found his left hand was shaking. No, no, Superintendent Camp-bell reassured him, the body had already been removed to the po-lice mortuary. The house had been polluted by the living Richard Mott, and now it was being polluted by the dead one. There was no reality, he reminded himself, only the nanosecond, the atom of a breath. A breath that was scented like a butcher shop. He was glad now that he had eaten neither breakfast nor lunch.

  “How did he die?” Did he really want to know?

  “We’re still waiting for the results of the autopsy, Mr. Canning.”

  Martin was waiting for the right moment to say, “I’ve just spent a drugged night in a hotel with a man who had a gun,” but Camp-bell kept asking him if he could tell if there was “anything missing”from the house. The only thing Martin could think of was his watch, but that had disappeared the day before yesterday.

  “A Rolex,” he said, and the detective raised an eyebrow and said, “An eighteen-carat oyster Yacht-Master? Like the one that Mr. Mott was wearing?”

  “Was he? Do you think Richard was killed in the course of a burglary that went wrong? Did someone break in thinking the house was empty [because I was spending a drugged night in a hotel with a man who had a gun] and Richard came downstairs and took him by surprise?” Martin could hear himself talking like a Crime-watch presenter. He tried to stop, but it seemed he couldn’t. “Did he disturb an intruder?”

  “It has all the hallmarks of an opportunistic crime,” Campbell said cautiously, “a burglar surprised in the act, as you say, but we’re keeping an open mind. And there was no break-in. Mr. Mott ei-ther opened the door to his killer or brought him home with him. We estimate his time of death to have been somewhere between four and seven o’clock this morning.”

  A uniformed policewoman passed them on the stairs. There were strangers everywhere in his house. He felt like a stranger himself. The policewoman was carrying a large plastic box that reminded Martin of a bread bin. She was holding it carefully away from her body as if it contained something dangerous or delicate. “Crossing on the stairs,” she said cheerfully to her superintendent, “that’s bad luck. And all those broken mirrors downstairs,” she added, shaking her head and laughing. Campbell frowned at her levity.

  “We haven’t found the murder weapon,” he said to Martin. “We need to know if there’s anything missing from the house that might have been used to kill Mr. Mott.”

  It seemed ridiculous to be using words such as “weapon” and “kill” in his lovely Merchiston house. They were words that belonged in Nina Riley’s lexicon. “So you see, Bertie, the murder weapon that killed the laird was actually an icicle taken from the overhang on the dovecote.The murderer simply threw it in the kitchen stove once he had used it—that’s why the police have been unable to
find it.” He sus-pected he had stolen this plot device from Agatha Christie. But didn’t they say there was nothing new under the sun?

  “We can’t discount the fact that this might have been personal, Martin.” Martin wondered at what point he had segued from “sir” into “Martin.”

  “You mean that someone came here intending to kill Richard?” Martin said. Martin could understand that, Richard could provoke you into murderous thoughts.

  “Well, that, certainly,” Campbell said, “but I was thinking about you. Do you have any enemies, Martin? Is there anyone who might want to kill you?”

  A miasma of Usher-like doom seemed to suddenly rise up and fold itself around the house like a wet shroud. Death had stalked its rooms. He had a terrible headache. Death had found him. It may not have taken him, but it had found him. And it was coming to exact retribution.

  Robert Campbell escorted Martin to “his friend’s room.” Martin wanted to say, “He’s not my friend,” but that seemed cruel and heartless, considering what had happened.

  Martin hadn’t been in the room since he had first shown Richard into it, saying, “If there’s anything you want, just say.” Then, it had been the “guest room,” with a pretty blue-and-white toile de Jouy on the walls, a cream carpet on the floor, and a neat pyramid of white guest towels on the French sleigh bed, with a copestone of Crabtree and Evelyn’s lily-of-the-valley soap. (“Are you always this anal, Martin?” Richard Mott laughed when he walked in the room. “Yes,” Martin said.)

  Now the guest room was like a doss-house. It smelled ripe, as if Richard had been eating takeaways—and, indeed, beneath the bed there was a pizza box that still contained a slice of old, cold pepperoni pizza and a foil container of something possibly Chinese, along with plates and saucers full of cigarette butts. The floor was littered with balled-up dirty socks, underpants, used tissues (God knows what was on them), all kinds of bits of paper that were scribbled on, a couple of porn mags. “He wasn’t the tidy sort,” Martin said.

  “Is there anything missing from this room, do you think, Martin?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t really tell.” Richard Mott was missing, but that seemed like stating the obvious.

  A police constable was rifling through a plastic carrier bag full of correspondence. “Sir?” he said to Robert Campbell, handing him a letter that he held gingerly by one corner in his gloved hand. Robert Campbell read it with a frown and asked Martin, “Did anyone have a grudge against Mr. Mott?”

  “Well, he got a lot of fan mail,” Martin said.

  “Fan mail? What kind of fan mail?”

  “‘Richard Mott, you’re a wanking wanker.’That kind.”

  “And was he?” Robert Campbell asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Can I ask you where you were last night, Martin?” Campbell asked, his broad, friendly features betraying no indication that he held Martin responsible in any way for what had happened in his house, to his “friend.” He sighed, a great deep sigh, the kind a very sad horse might give, while he waited for Martin’s reply.

  Martin felt a burning pain, like indigestion, beneath his rib cage. He recognized it as guilt even though he was innocent. Of this, at least. But did it matter? Guilt was guilt. It had to be assigned somewhere. Paid for somehow. If there was cosmic justice at work, and Martin was inclined to think there was, then at the end of the day the weights had to balance. An eye for an eye.

  “Last night?” Campbell prompted.

  “Well,” Martin said, “there was a man with a baseball bat.” It

  sounded like the beginning of a story that could go anywhere— and he was a champion player in the major league. Or sad—and when he found out that he was dying, he willed the bat to his favorite grandson.The shape that the real tale had taken seemed unbelievable in compar-ison to its fictional alternatives. In the end Martin didn’t mention the gun, he could see it might be considered a detail too far.

  26

  Bill, the gardener, appeared like an apparition at the French windows, giving Gloria a start. It had begun to spit with rain out-side, but Bill never seemed to notice the weather. Whenever Gloria commented on it, “Isn’t it a lovely morning?” or “Goodness, it’s cold today,” and so on, he would glance around with a perplexed expression on his face, as if he were trying to see something invisible. It seemed an odd trait in a gardener, surely the weather should be part of his nature? She offered him coffee, as usual, although he had never in five years accepted. Bill always brought a khaki canvas satchel in which he carried an old-fashioned thermos flask and various greaseproof paper packets of food—sandwiches, Gloria supposed, and cake, perhaps a hard-boiled egg, all prepared by his wife.

  Gloria used to prepare a packed lunch for Graham. That was a long time ago, when the world was much younger and Gloria took pride in making “traybake” cakes and sausage rolls and filling little Tupperware containers with lettuce and tomato and carrot batons, all for Graham to consume mindlessly in a lay-by somewhere. Or perhaps he just threw the contents of the little Tupper-ware containers in the nearest bin and went and ate scampi and chips in a pub with an eager-breasted woman. Sometimes Gloria wondered where she had been when feminism occurred—in the kitchen making interesting packed lunches, presumably. Of course, Graham hadn’t eaten a packed lunch in decades, wasn’t eating at all now, instead had mysterious substances added and subtracted from his body by tubes, like an astronaut.

  Gloria wondered why Bill wasn’t unwrapping his little paper parcels of food in the privacy of the shed. He cleared his throat in a self-conscious way. He was very small, like a jockey, and he made Gloria feel like an elephant.

  “Can I help you with something?” she asked him. He was always “Bill,” while she was always “Mrs. Hatter,” and she had long ago given up saying, “Call me Gloria.” He used to work for some kind of aristocrat in the Borders and was more comfortable in a mistress/servant relationship. Gloria almost expected him to tug his forelock.

  She was distracted by the sight of a smear of chocolate on her white blouse. She supposed it was from the chocolate digestives she had breakfasted on. She imagined the little factory of cells that was her body taking in the chocolate and fat and flour (and prob-ably carcinogenic additives) and sending them off on conveyor belts to different processing rooms. This industry, dedicated to the greater good that was Gloria, was run on cooperative, profit-sharing lines. In this model Gloria factory, the cells were a cheer-ful, happy workforce who sang along to Worker’s Playtime from a Tannoy radio. They were unionized and benefited from subsidized housing and health care and never became entangled in the factory machinery and mangled to death like her brother, Jonathan.

  Bill’s wife, it turned out, had a brain that was “turning into a sponge,” according to Bill, and therefore he was going to have to give up coming on Wednesdays (“if you don’t mind, Mrs. Hatter”) and tend his sponge-brain wife instead of Gloria’s garden. Gloria thought about mentioning Graham’s present condition to him— having a damaged spouse was the first thing they had found in common—but they had already had the longest conversation they had ever had, and she decided he probably couldn’t bear any more.

  The phone rang for the hundredth time. Bill didn’t question Gloria standing patiently, waiting for it to stop. Gloria wondered what it would have been like to have been married to such a passive man. Infuriating, probably. Say what you like about Graham, he had given her a good run for her money.

  After he’d delivered his news, Bill disappeared into his shed and, presumably, ate his lunch as usual, because thirty minutes later he emerged, brushing crumbs from his mustache, and began to aerate the lawn with a device that looked like an instrument of torture. Gloria made herself a cheese-and-chutney sandwich (gooseberry chutney, her own recipe, the gooseberries picked a few weeks ago out at Stenton Farm) and ate it standing at the kitchen counter and then went into the hall and listened to the messages on the answering machine. There were so many now that the latter ones had erased the
earlier ones. Gloria thought this was how her own memory worked, except the opposite way round.

  Everyone wanted Graham for one reason or another. His ab-sence was causing a rising tide of panic in the Hatter Homes’ offices, already under mental siege from the Fraud Unit. “You’ve not done a Robert Maxwell, have you?” said the fraught voice of his sec-ond in command, Gareth Lawson.

  Pam fluttering, “Oh, Gloria, can I have your recipe for Turkish cheesecake, I know I’ve written it down somewhere but I can’t put my hands on it.” It was a very good recipe—a packet of Philadelphia, a tin of Fussell’s sterilized cream, and half a dozen eggs beaten together and poured into a caramel-coated mold and cooked gently in a bain-marie. It was the kind of recipe a person treasured once they had been given it. Pam would not be getting it off Gloria a second time.

  A short barking, “Graham, still in fucking Thurso?” from Murdo Miller, endless “Mother? Mother, where are you?” from Emily. An abrasive West Coast voice that Gloria recognized as their account-ant, saying, “What’s going on,Graham? You’re not answering your mo-bile, you didn’t turn up at our meeting yesterday.” The stentorian tones of Alistair Crichton blared, “Where the fuck are you, Graham? You seem to have disappeared off the face of the fucking planet.” Gloria thought that she wouldn’t like to be a criminal appearing in his court. A judge who, if he were judged himself, would be found seriously wanting. “Justice has nothing to do with the law,” he once remarked airily to her over a tray of canapés at some “do” or other. “Graham, why aren’t you answering your mobile? We have to talk, do you understand? I hope you’re not bailing out on me.”

  The phone rang before this message was finished, and the an-swering machine summarily ditched Sheriff Crichton and began recording the unhappy tones of Christine Tennant, Graham’s long-suffering secretary of ten years. (“PA, actually, Gloria,” she con-tinually, apologetically, corrected, but Gloria knew that if you typed and took notes and answered a phone, you were a secretary. Call a spade a spade.) Her usual rather whiny tones now had a near-hysterical edge to them. “Gloria, everyone’s looking for Graham, he’s really needed here. Do you know how I can contact him in Thurso?” Over the years, Gloria had occasionally wondered if Graham had ever had sex with Christine Tennant, she had been with him for ten years, after all, yet still seemed unnaturally enamored of him, surely only a woman suffering from unrequited passion could remain that fond of Graham. On the other hand, Graham was a man of clichés, and therefore sleeping with his secretary would be the kind of thing he would do. That would be a rather good epitaph for his headstone. GRAHAM HATTER—A MAN OF CLICHéS. You didn’t have headstones if you were cremated, did you? You had nothing, an epitaph written on the wind and water.