One Good Turn

by Kate Atkinson

“The Met are looking into it for us,” Sutherland said. Sutherland reminded Martin of someone, but he couldn’t think who. He had this unsettling way of smiling at inappropriate mo-ments so that Martin, who tended to smile when he was smiled at, found himself responding with an inane grin to statements such as, “Mr. Mott’s skull was shattered by a blunt instrument.”

  A female detective sergeant sat next to Sutherland. She was silent throughout, like a mute. There was a mirror on the wall, and Martin wondered if it was two-way. He couldn’t think why else you would have a mirror in an interview room. Was someone in the looking-glass world watching him dunk his convict-grade biscuit into his tea?

  “He did exist,” Martin said.

  “No one’s doubting his existence, Mr. Canning,” Sutherland said, like a pedantic philosopher. Martin missed Superintendent Camp-bell’s amiable “Martin,” as if they were old acquaintances. “He was involved in a road-rage incident,” Sutherland continued. He smiled and paused rather pointedly before saying, “The same one you claim you yourself were.”

  “I was,” Martin said. “I made a statement.”

  “The incident was logged just after midday yesterday. The vic-tim—your Paul Bradley—was treated at the Royal Infirmary for a minor head injury, he signed the register of the Four Clans. Hun-dreds of people saw him during the course of yesterday, his exis-tence is not in doubt. The problem is—” Another well-timed pause for a smile. It stretched the edges of his face, the Cheshire Cat would have struggled in a contest with Chief Inspector Sutherland. “The problem, Mr. Canning, is that no one remembers you.”

  “The police took a statement from me at the hospital.”

  “But after that?”

  “I was with Paul Bradley.”

  There was a knock on the door, and a constable came in and put a piece of paper on the desk in front of the silent sergeant. She read what was on the paper, her sphinxlike features revealing nothing, and then passed the paper over to Sutherland.

  “The mysterious Mr. Bradley,” Sutherland murmured.

  “He’s real,” Martin protested. “His name’s in the hotel register.”

  “Yours isn’t, though, is it?” He waved the piece of paper at Martin. “We asked the Met to check the address that Paul Bradley gave, and it turns out it’s a row of lockups. The mysterious Mr. Bradley doesn’t seem to exist after all.”

  The previously silent female detective leaned forward suddenly and said to Martin, earnestly, as if she wanted to help him, as if she were a therapist or a counselor, “Were you and Richard Mott lovers, Martin? Did you have a tiff?”

  “A tiff?”

  “An argument that got out of hand, escalated into violence? Was he jealous that you had gone to a hotel with another man?”

  “It wasn’t like that. It was nothing like that!” He removed his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. He wished people would stop asking him questions.

  “Or, let me run this by you,” Inspector Sutherland suggested amiably, “you were involved in a gay lovers’ threesome that went horribly wrong.”

  Richard Mott’s parents had traveled up from Milton Keynes to identify their son. Richard had a whole repertoire of jokes in his routine about his parents, about their politics, their religion, their bad taste. None of the things he said about them onstage seemed pertinent to the heartbroken, bewildered couple grieving in the police mortuary. The identity of the corpse had become a vexed issue for the police. Reluctant to expose the Motts to the full horror of what had happened to their son, they had muddled matters more by showing them the flatlined Rolex that Richard had taken from Martin. They had cried with relief because it “definitely wasn’t Richard’s.”

  They showed the watch to Martin, and he said yes, it belonged to him (there was a crack across the glass, he tried to imagine how that might have happened), and Mr. Mott shouted, “There you are, you see!” pointing at Martin as if this were proof that he was the dead man rather than their son. Richard Mott seemed to have appropriated everything that belonged to Martin, including his identity.

  “We could wait for dental records,” Sutherland murmured to Martin, “but that would take some time, and the whole thing has become so... confused.” Martin knew he was being asked to step up and didn’t really see how he could not. Be a man. Do as you would unto others. The meek shall inherit the earth. He wanted Sutherland to think well of him, so after a considerable briefing—“You have to prepare yourself for a shock” and “The injuries are very unpleasant”—he was taken into the small room that smelled not only of antiseptic but also of something sweet and unpleasant, and there, beneath a white sheet, were the battered remains of Richard Mott. Neither better nor worse than he had imagined. Simply different, and in some way artificial, as if Richard Mott had been made up for a film. Martin thought of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video, but it was definitely Richard. There was no doubt at all about that. Martin waited to be over-come by the horror of it, wondered if he would faint or vomit, but none of these things happened, he just found himself feeling grateful that it was Richard Mott lying there and not himself. Worse things had, after all, happened to him than viewing Richard Mott’s corpse.

  “There but for fortune,” Sutherland said.

  “I don’t understand,” Martin puzzled, “who identified me as Richard Mott? Who identified Richard Mott as me?” It depended on which way you looked at it, he supposed.

  “I believe it was your brother, Mr. Canning,” Sutherland said.

  “My brother?” His own brother had identified him wrongly? Somehow that said everything about what was wrong with their relationship.

  Sutherland tapped his wrist, Martin wondered if it was a Ma-sonic gesture of some kind, but he said, “The watch, we showed him your watch, Martin. It was an informal ID, we would have got to the truth eventually.”

  “I’d better phone him,” Martin said.

  “Probably.”

  It had proved to be an odd kind of conversation (“I’m not dead, Chris, the police made a mistake”) that hadn’t gone well. Christopher was still driving home. “I’m just passing Haddington,” he said as if his geographical location were relevant. “Wait a minute, I’m not on the hands-free.” This was followed by the noise of fum-bling, a curse that seemed to indicate the phone had been dropped, scrabbling, and, finally, “Wouldn’t want to get pulled over by a fucking policeman.” Martin wondered if Sutherland, sitting across a desk from him, heard this slur.

  Christopher proceeded to run through a range of emotions— disbelief, shock, disappointment, and finally an irritable “For fuck’s sake, Martin,” as if Martin had committed some kind of de-ranged prank. Martin supposed his brother had spent the previous couple of hours of bereavement getting used to the idea of being in possession of Martin’s copyright for the next seventy years, to say nothing of the Merchiston house.

  Thank goodness they hadn’t phoned his mother down in East-bourne. He tried to imagine how his mother would have responded to the news of his death. He expected she would have been underwhelmed.

  The anonymous civilian came back on the phone, and Clare rolled her eyes at the news that they were still having trouble finding him a room for the night.

  “You would think,” she said, a sentence that apparently didn’t need completing. Martin sighed and said, “I think I know a place that will have vacancies.”

  “It’s all been a bit of a cock-up, hasn’t it?” Clare said cheerfully to Martin. “It made the papers, you know.Your death.”

  “My death,” Martin echoed. His death had been pronounced. A murder is announced. It was like a witch doctor laying a curse on him, dooming him to invisibility or death. Isn’t that what happened? The witch doctor told you that you were going to die, so you did, by the power of suggestion rather than any actual ability on his part to hex, but the means were moot when the result was certain.

  Martin asked Clare to stop at a newsagent on George Street, one good thing about being in a police car, perhaps the only good thing,
was the fact that they could stop anywhere they wanted. LOCAL WRITER MURDERED, he read out to her from the Evening News as he climbed back into the car. “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” he added.

  “Well, yes,” she said, puzzled, “because you’re not actually dead, are you?”

  “No, I’m not,” he agreed. There was a photograph beneath the headline, it looked like some kind of poor-quality holiday snap that Martin couldn’t recollect ever seeing before, and he wondered where on earth they had got it from.

  The traffic forced them to a halt outside the Assembly Rooms, where a poster announcing a gala benefit for Amnesty still displayed Richard Mott’s name, in smallish print near the bottom of the bill.

  Clare took the opportunity to scan the newspaper. “You’re quite famous,” she said, sounding surprised. “Alex Blake, whose real name was Martin Canning, trained for the priesthood before becoming a religious studies teacher,” Clare continued, “. . . turned his hand to writing late in life.”

  “I was never a priest,” Martin said, “that’s disinformation. And forty-two,” Martin said, “I hardly think that’s late in life, do you?”

  She said nothing, merely smiled in that sympathetic way again. He wondered how old she was, she looked about twelve.

  He opened a packet of Minstrels he’d bought in the newsagent and tipped some into her palm. “What kind of books do you write, then?” she asked.

  “Novels.”

  “What kind of novels?”

  “Crime novels,” Martin said.

  “Really? That’s ironic, isn’t it? Fiction stranger than truth and all that.”They set off again, plowing through the clotted traffic as far as the next zebra crossing, where a seemingly endless line of peo-ple trailed in front of them. “They go slow on purpose,” Clare said, “gives them a false sense of power, but at the end of the day, they’re on foot and I’m in a car.”

  “The author of seven novels based on private detective Nina Riley,” she continued to read relentlessly. “It’s good you have a woman heroine,” she said. “Is she a real kick-ass?”

  Martin pondered the question, he liked the idea of Nina Riley being kick-ass, it elevated her out of the tweed-and-pearls postwar world into something more dynamic. She knew how to fly a plane and climb mountains, she had driven a racing car, she could fence, although the opportunities for swordplay were few and far between, even in the forties. “The blighter’s getting away, Bertie. I need a weapon—throw me that hockey stick!”

  “Well, in her own way, yes, I suppose she is.”

  “So do you make a living from it?” Clare asked.

  “Yes. Better than most people. I’m lucky. Do you read much?” he added, in an attempt to steer the conversation away from him-self.

  “No time.” She laughed. Martin couldn’t imagine a world where there was no time to read.

  “His agent, Melanie Lenehan”—wow, there’s a tongue twister— “was quoted as saying,‘This is a tragedy in every sense of the word.Martin was just beginning to enjoy the fruits of his phenomenal success. He was writing at the top of his game.’” Martin felt a pang of disappointment that Melanie had not bothered to come up with any-thing better than banal platitudes. Or perhaps that’s what she believed he merited.

  Clare accompanied him into the Four Clans and rang the brass bell on the counter. The thing about the police, Martin was beginning to notice, was that they behaved like people who didn’t need to ask permission, because, of course, they didn’t. Paul Bradley had possessed the same authority, it was something natu-ral and unstrained. These people didn’t spend their lives being apologetic.

  A woman appeared reluctantly from the room at the back of the reception. She wiped a crumb from the corner of her mouth and gave them both an unfriendly stare. She had a bulky figure, and her ill-fitting gray suit and severe hairstyle, not to mention her de-meanor, reminded Martin of a prison governor. (Or rather his idea of a prison governor, never having met one in real life. Not yet, anyway.) She was wearing a badge that said MAUREEN, but she looked too formidable to be addressed with such intimacy. He caught a glimpse of a table in the back room, on which was a well-thumbed copy of the Evening News and a plate containing a half-eaten toasted sandwich. Even from where he was standing, Martin could see the blaring headline LOCAL WRITER MURDERED and make out his own grainy features in the photograph.

  “Maureen” checked him in, unfazed by the fact that he was accompanied by a police officer. No mention was made of how he was going to pay the bill. He was handed the key to his room as if he were a prisoner who was allowed to lock himself into his own cell.

  “Right, I’ll be off now, then,” Clare said. “Good luck, with the writing and ...everything.”

  On his weary way up the stairs, Martin caught the eye of the stag. It regarded him mutely, an expression of moody indifference on its moldy features.

  30

  “Murdered, Jackson!” Julia said, her face a pantomime of round-eyed horror, but she couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice.

  “Murdered?” Jackson echoed.

  “I was eating lunch with Richard Mott yesterday, and today he’s dead. Caught the umpire’s eye and Bob’s your uncle—gone.” She pronounced “gone” as “gawn” in a Dick Van Dyke kind of cockney. She seemed positively euphoric compared with this morning. “The police have been round interviewing everyone. Murdered, Jackson,” she said again, relishing the word. They were standing at the door of the sweatbox that passed for a female dressing room in Julia’s venue, into which actresses from another play were also crammed, most of them in their underwear. Jackson tried not to look. He felt as if he were backstage at a strip show, albeit a rather highbrow one, where people said, “I can’t believe it, he was in my light the whole show yesterday.” Julia herself had changed out of her sackcloth-and-ashes costume but was still dithering, unwilling to leave the world of performance behind. Of course, for Julia every day was a performance in one way or an-other.

  “You said you had a drink with him,” Jackson said. “You didn’t say you ate.”

  “Does it matter?” Julia frowned.

  “Well, not now,” Jackson said.

  “What do you mean, ‘not now’? Would it have mattered if he was still alive?” Julia’s husky voice rose to a more theatrical pitch. She could have played to the whole of the Albert Hall without amplification if she’d wanted to. “I had a cheese roll, he had pasta, it was hardly cunnilingus.”

  The underwear-clad actresses all turned to stare at them. “Please,” Jackson hissed. When had everything between them become so jagged? Had Richard Mott paid for lunch? No such thing as a free lunch, except for the biggest fish.

  “And how are you feeling, Julia?” Julia said. “How did your preview go?”

  “Sorry,” Jackson said. “How did your preview go?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Another preview? Tonight?” Jackson said.

  “Well, God knows we need one,” Julia said, drawing hard on a cigarette and then breaking out into a fit of filthy coughing. They were standing in the street outside the venue. Just over twenty-four hours ago Jackson had witnessed Honda Man trying to kill Peugeot Guy on this very spot.

  “I told you this morning,” Julia said vaguely when her scarred lungs had recovered from the coughing bout.

  “I didn’t see you this morning,” Jackson said.

  “You don’t listen,” Julia said. What a strangely wifely thing for her to say.

  “I didn’t not listen,” Jackson said. “I didn’t see you.”

  “That’s okay, isn’t it?” Julia said, ignoring him. “You don’t have plans?”

  He sighed. “No, I don’t have plans. What about now? We could have a drink. Afternoon tea?” Surely she would respond to those two words.

  “It’s much too late for afternoon tea,” Julia said crossly. Her left eyelid twitched, and she took another long, desperate drag on her cigarette. “And Tobias is about to giv
e us notes.”

  “You always have notes,” Jackson grumbled.

  “Well, thank goodness for that,” Julia snapped, “because we cer-tainly need as much help as we can get.” She ground out the cig-arette beneath the sole of her boot. She was wearing black lace-up boots with a high heel that made Jackson have unchaste thoughts about Victorian governesses.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, suddenly contrite, pressing herself against him. He felt her body slacken, as if her strings had just been cut, and he rested his chin on the top of her head. She was taller than usual because of the boots. They both kept their arms by their sides, just leaning against each other like two unbalanced people trying to hold each other up. He smelled her perfume, something spicy like cinnamon that she hadn’t worn before. He noticed for the first time that her earrings were tiny porcelain pansies. He did-n’t think he’d seen them before, either. Her hair was mad as usual, you really could imagine birds nesting in it, he wouldn’t have been surprised if one evening a flock of rooks returned to roost there. (“Wouldn’t that be wonderful?” Julia said.) A chopstick that, in a victory of creativity over physics, seemed to be holding the whole edifice in place nearly poked Jackson’s eye out.

  There was a poster on the wall behind them for Looking for the Equator in Greenland. It showed Julia reaching out to the audience in a manner that Julia said was supposed to be beseeching but to Jackson looked whimsical. The faces of the other cast members were stacked in a kind of pyramid around her, in a way that was, unfortunately, reminiscent of Queen in the video for “Bohemian Rhapsody.” It was pasted next to one for Richard Mott’s COMIC VIAGRA FOR THE MIND. Someone had taken a felt-tip pen and scrawled “Canceled” across his face.

  She stepped away from him and said, “The preview should be finished about nine, although we ran over this afternoon. We’ll probably go for something to eat, then for a drink. Come and join us, help us lick our wounds.” He wished she was in a good play, one the critics would rave about, one that ended up transferring to the West End.