One Good Turn

by Kate Atkinson

  The two semiconscious parts of Jackson’s brain finally commu-nicated with each other. This was a slower process than it used to be—Jackson imagined signal flags rather than high-speed broad-band. One day, he supposed, the different parts of his brain would find they were unable to interpret the messages. Flags waving helplessly in the wind. And that would be it. Senility.

  Jackson sprinted down the stairs, past the huddled masses in steerage, and asked the driver to open the doors. The pink van was farther up Princes Street now, Jackson could have kept up with it at a jog, but sooner or later it was going to untangle itself from this traffic and then he would lose it. He dashed across the street in front of a hooting bus bearing down on him (buses had somehow become the bane of his life) and, at the taxi rank on Hanover Street, threw himself into the back of a black cab. “Where to?” the driver asked, and Jackson felt absurdly pleased with himself that he was able to say, “See that pink van? Follow it.”

  They weaved their way through the leafy pleasantness of subur-ban Edinburgh. (“Morningside,” the cab driver said.) No mean streets these, Jackson thought. The black cab felt lumbering and ob-vious, hardly the ideal vehicle for covert activity. Still, the driver of the pink van didn’t seem to notice, perhaps the black cab was so obvious that you couldn’t see it. He supposed he should phone it in. He had Louise Monroe’s card with her station number on it. The phone was answered by some kind of minion who said that “Inspector Monroe” was “out of the office” and did he want to leave a message? He didn’t, thank you. He redialed the number (in his experience, a phone was hardly ever answered twice in a row by the same person) and had Louise Monroe’s out-of-office status reiterated. He asked for her mobile number and was refused. If she had really wanted him to keep in touch, she should have given it to him, shouldn’t she? No one could say he hadn’t tried. It wasn’t his fault if he had gone rogue, the renegade old lone wolf. Solving crimes.

  The Combo drew to a halt, and Jackson said to the cab driver, “Keep on going, round the corner,” where he paid and got out of the cab, and then walked nonchalantly back round the corner.

  WE DO WHAT YOU WANT US TO DO! A Julia-like exclamation point. Jackson wondered if that was strictly true. Could they, for example, turn Looking for the Equator in Greenland into a good play? Heal the sick and make the lame walk? Find his dead woman in the Forth?

  “It’s a slogan,” the mean-faced woman unloading buckets and mops from the van onto the pavement said. She had an embroi-dered badge on the pocket of her pink uniform that said HOUSE-KEEPER, an appellation that Jackson found vaguely menacing. The Mafia were supposed to call contract killers “cleaners,” weren’t they? (But probably only in the fiction he occasionally read.) What would that make a “Housekeeper”? A kind of �ller?

  “Favors,” Jackson said pleasantly, “that’s a nice name.”

  “It’s a cleaning agency,” the mean-faced woman said without looking at him.

  “I wondered,” Jackson said, “if you had the address for your office. I haven’t been able to find it anywhere.”

  She looked at him suspiciously. “Why would you want it?”

  “Oh, you know,” Jackson said, “just to go in and have a chat, about getting the cleaners in.” It sounded even more like Mob-speak when you put it like that.

  “Everything is done on the phone,” the Housekeeper said. She looked as if she breakfasted on lemons—“thrawn-faced,” his father would have called her—but she had an accent as soft as Scotch mist.

  “Everything on the phone?” Jackson asked. “How do you get new business?”

  “Word of mouth. Personal recommendations.”

  A sallow young woman, built like a peasant and radiating hostility, came out of the nearest house and, without a word, picked up the buckets and mops and carried them inside.

  “I’ll be back to pick you up in two hours!” the Housekeeper shouted after her, and then she got into the van and drove off without giving Jackson a second look.

  Jackson loped off in the opposite direction, trying to look insouciant in case the Housekeeper was watching him in her rearview mirror. When the pink van was out of sight, he doubled back and entered the house through the front door. He could hear the sounds of running water in the kitchen and someone clattering about upstairs. The noise of an aggressively wielded vacuum cleaner came from the back of the house, so Jackson reckoned there were at least three women in there. They might not all be women, of course. Don’t make sexist assumptions, they always got you into trouble. With women, anyway.

  He decided to target the one in the kitchen. Slow down, Jackson, he said to himself, you’re not in a potential threat situation here. Armyspeak. The army felt so long ago now, yet it remained like a pattern in him. Sometimes he wondered what would have happened to him if his father had let him go down the pit instead of joining up. Every aspect of his life would have been different, he himself would have been a different man. He would be on the scrap heap now, of course, redundant, unwanted. But wasn’t that what he was now?

  In 1995, he remembered the year, remembered the moment, he had been at home in Cambridge, when his wife was still his wife, not an ex, and he was a policeman and she was hugely pregnant with Marlee (Jackson imagined their baby tightly packed like the heart of a cabbage inside his wife), and Jackson was washing up after dinner (when he still called it “tea,” before his language was buffed into something more middle-class and southern by his wife). They ate early at the end of her pregnancy, any later and she said she was too full to sleep, so while he washed the pots he lis-tened to the Six O’clock News on Radio 4, and somewhere in the middle of that night’s bulletin they announced the closure of the pit his father had worked in all his life. Jackson couldn’t remember why that pit had made the news when so many had closed by then with so little fuss, perhaps because it had been one of the largest coalfields in the area, perhaps because it was the last working mine in the region, but whatever, he had stood with a soapy plate in his hand and listened to the newsreader, and without any warning the tears had started. He wasn’t even sure why—for everything that had gone, he supposed. For the path he hadn’t taken, for a world he’d never lived in. “Why are you crying?” Josie asked, lumbering into the kitchen, she could hardly get through the door by that stage. That was when she cared about every emo-tion he experienced. “Fucking Thatcher,” he said, shrugging it off in a masculine way, making it political, not personal, although in this case there was no difference.

  And then they got a baby and a dishwasher, and Jackson con-tinued on and didn’t think again for a long time about the path he hadn’t chosen, a way of life that had never been, yet that didn’t stop him from aching for it in some confused place in his soul.

  His target maid was at the sink too, wringing out a cloth and vig-orously wiping the draining board back and forth, back and forth. No crucifixion ears as far as he could see, although she had her back to him and was singing along to the radio in a foreign accent. There was so much background noise in the house that Jackson was unsure how to proceed without startling her. He was struck by three things: one—she wasn’t the peasanty one that the Housekeeper had barked at, and two—she had a great behind, made greater by the tight skirt of the pink uniform. “Two hard-boiled eggs in a handkerchief,” his brother used to say. His brother had been a connoisseur of women. One day, one day too soon, men would look at his daughter in the same way. And if he saw them looking at her like that, he would beat ten kinds of crap out of them.

  Jackson had spent half his life in uniform without thinking much about it beyond that it made getting up in the morning eas-ier when you didn’t have to make a choice about what to wear, so the effect a woman in uniform could have always struck him as curious. Not all uniforms, obviously, not Nazis, dinner ladies, traffic wardens. He tried to recall if he had ever seen Julia in a uni-form, offhand he couldn’t really think of one that would suit her, she wasn’t really a uniform kind of girl. Louise Monroe’s black suit/white shirt c
ombo was a kind of uniform. She had a little pulse that beat in her throat. It made her look more vulnerable than she probably was.

  He never really got the third thought to the front of his brain because the woman in this particular uniform caught sight of him at that moment and reached into the dishwasher, plucked a big dinner plate from the rack, and in one smooth action sliced it through the air as if it were a Frisbee, aiming straight for his head. Jackson ducked and the plate crashed through the open kitchen doorway into the hall. He put his hands in the air before she reached for another plate. “You don’t take any prisoners, do you?” he said.

  “University discus champion,” she said without any apparent remorse for having nearly decapitated him. “Why are you creeping?”

  “I’m not creeping, I was looking for someone to clean my flat,” Jackson said, trying to sound like a helpless male (“Shouldn’t be too hard,” he heard Josie’s voice say in his head). “I saw the van and . . .”

  “We’re not called cleaners. We’re called maids.” She relented a little. “I’m sorry, I’m nervous.” She sat down at the table and pushed her hands through her hair, her hands were red and raw with some kind of dermatitis. She said, “This morning, Sophia, a maid, a friend, found a man who was murdered in a house we go to. Was terrible,” the foreign girl said mournfully.

  “I’m sure it was,” Jackson said.

  “We’re not paid enough for that.”

  Money. Always a good starting point, in Jackson’s experience. He removed five twenty-pound notes from his wallet and placed them on the table. “What’s your name?” he said to the girl.

  “Marijut.”

  “Okay, Marijut,” Jackson said, flicking the switch on the elec-tric kettle, “how about a nice cup of tea?”

  “A young woman,” Jackson repeated patiently, “I want to know if she’s on your books.”There was a listless air in the offices of Fa-vors. The girl in charge, who seemed to be the only person in the building, spoke a poor kind of English and seemed to want will-fully to misunderstand everything Jackson said to her. He automatically converted to a kind of simplistic pidgin because deep in his atavistic native soul he believed that foreigners couldn’t be flu-ent in English, whereas, of course, it was the English who were incapable of speaking foreign languages. “Ears? Crosses?” he said loudly.

  The office was in a neglected cobbled close off the Royal Mile.

  The soot had long since been blasted off the face of Edinburgh, but the stonework in this place was still encrusted with the black reminder of the capital’s reeking past. It was a cold, unloved place, strangely untouched by the hand of either the Enlightenment or the property developer.

  Favors was squeezed in between a restaurant (a self-styled “bistro”) and Fringe Venue 87. Jackson peered into the dim and meaty interior of the bistro, where the last few lunch customers still lingered. He made a mental note never to eat there. From the outside, the Fringe venue looked like a sauna, but it proved to be housing a disgruntled group of American high school children playing The Caucasian Chalk Circle to an audience of two men who looked as if they might have also mistaken the venue for a sauna. Julia had warned him about Edinburgh “saunas.” “Don’t for one minute imagine that they are actually saunas, Jackson.”

  The office had an unremarkable black-painted street door on whose jamb was fixed a cheap plastic nameplate that read FA-VORS—IMPORT AND EXPORT. No exclamatory promise to fulfill his desires, he noticed. “Import” and “export”—if ever there were two words that covered a multitude of sins, these were they. There was a security camera above the buzzer so that it was impossible to stand at the door without being scrutinized. He put on his most trustworthy face and got in by posing as a courier. No one ever seemed to ask couriers for their IDs.

  He had to go up a stair and along a corridor that was stacked with industrial-size containers of cleaning fluids. HAZARDOUS MA-TERIALS, one of them said. Another sported a black skull and crossbones, but the writing on the container was in a language that Jackson didn’t recognize. He thought about Marijut, wringing the cloth out, cleaning the draining board with her washerwoman hands. If nothing else, he could report Favors to Environmental Health. Another wall of boxes was stenciled with one mysterious word: MATRYOSHKA.

  Perhaps Favors was some kind of crime cartel that was running everything in the city. And what was it with the crucifixes? A Vatican-run crime cartel?

  “This woman had crucifixes in her ears,” Jackson said to the receptionist. “Crosses.” He took a pen from her desk and drew a crucifix on a pad of paper and pointed at his ears. “Earrings,” he said, like yours, he pointed toward the silver hoops in the recep-tionist’s ears. She looked at him as if he were mad. Marijut had told him that she didn’t recall seeing any girl with crucifix earrings. His description, “Five six, hundred twenty pounds, blond hair,” could easily have fitted half the girls she knew. “Me, for ex-ample,” she said. Or the receptionist.

  Jackson tapped the computer monitor and said, “Let’s look in here.”The girl gave him a surly glare and then scrolled idly down the screen.

  “What do you want her for?” the girl asked.

  “I don’t want her for anything. I want to know if she’s on your books.” Jackson craned his neck to catch a glimpse of the screen. The girl opened a file that looked like a CV, there was a thumb-nail photograph in the top left-hand corner, but she closed it down immediately. “Stop,” he said. “Go back, go back to that last one.” It was her, he could swear it was her. His dead girl.

  “She doesn’t work for us anymore,” the receptionist said. She gave a little hiccup of laughter as if she were making a joke. “Her contract is terminated.” She clicked the files shut with an air of fi-nality and turned off the screen.

  “This woman I’m looking for,” he enunciated each word slowly and clearly, “this woman is dead.” Jackson made a slashing move-ment across his throat. The girl shrank away from him. He wasn’t very good at miming. He could have done with Julia’s help, no one played charades with as much enthusiasm as Julia, except per-haps for Marlee. How did you portray dead? He crossed his arms over his chest and closed his eyes. When he opened them, the Housekeeper was standing in front of him, regarding him quizzi

  cally. “He says he’s courier,” the girl at the computer said sarcastically. “Does he?” the Housekeeper said. “I’m looking for someone,” Jackson said stoutly, “a girl who’s

  gone missing.” “What’s her name?” the Housekeeper asked. “I don’t know.” “You’re looking for someone and you don’t know who she is?” “I can give you someone else,” the girl at the computer screen

  offered. “I don’t want someone else,” Jackson said. “What kind of agency are you?”

  The girl leaned closer to him over the desk and, giving Jackson a predatory kind of smile, said, “What kind of agency would you like us to be?”

  29

  “No room at the inn,” the policewoman assigned to look after Martin said. They were sitting in a car outside the police mortuary, waiting while a civilian on the radio back at head-quarters tried to find him somewhere to stay for the night. He couldn’t sleep among the aftermath of the carnage in his “active-crime-scene” house, wouldn’t have wanted to if he could. “You don’t have any friends you could stay the night with?” the police-woman asked. No, he didn’t. She gave him a sympathetic look. There was his brother in the Borders, of course, but there was little in the way of sanctuary to be had in his household, and he doubted he would be welcome there, anyway.

  “Clare” (“PC Clare Deponio”) looked like one of the police-women who had come to Paul Bradley’s aid yesterday, but they all looked alike in their uniforms. The police car was parked almost exactly where the Honda and the Peugeot had faced off against each other yesterday. Who would have thought that event would have faded into such insignificance?

  “The Festival,” Clare said, coming off the radio, “no hotel rooms anywhere, apparently.”

 
Superintendent Campbell had handed Martin over to someone only slightly more menial (“Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutherland”). Sutherland took (“accompanied”) Martin from his own house to a police station, where Martin had his fingerprints taken—it was exactly like the Society of Authors’ tour—the inspector said it was “for comparison,” but after that it stopped being like the Society of Authors’ tour because they gave him a white paper boilersuit to wear and took all his clothes away while they put him in an interview room and questioned him for a long time about his relationship with Richard Mott and his whereabouts at the time of Richard’s death. Martin felt like a convict. He was given tea and biscuits—Rich Tea, to denote his change in status. Pink wafers and chocolate bourbons for the innocent members of the Society of Authors, plain Rich Tea for people who spent drugged nights in dodgy hotel rooms with men. (“So you and Mr. Bradley slept together? In the same bed?”) He still hadn’t mentioned the gun. Inspector Sutherland enjoyed pretending to be baffled. “I’m having trouble getting my head round this, Mr. Canning— you saved a stranger’s life, you spent the night with him, but he disappeared before dawn. Meanwhile, in your own house, your friend was being bludgeoned to death.”

  Paul Bradley had an address in London, Martin remembered the nurse in A and E copying it down, the same address that he had watched him write in the hotel register.