One Good Turn

by Kate Atkinson

  “Where were you?” she said.

  “Where were you?” he said. Question with a question. It felt like an old war, one he’d fought several times. His phone rang before hostilities escalated. Louise Monroe asking him what he was like when he was fourteen. She had a son, it turned out. He wouldn’t have figured her for a mother.

  “Why are women phoning you in the middle of the night asking you about your teenage years?” Julia asked sleepily.

  “Maybe they find me interesting.” Julia chuckled, deep and throaty, it set off a cough, and by the time she’d recovered, it was too late to ask her why she found that so funny.

  33

  Louise dialed his number from her car and, before he even had time to say anything, asked, “What were you like when you were fourteen?”

  “Fourteen?”

  “Yes, fourteen,”she repeated. The sound of his voice was a kick. He was just the right side of wrong.

  “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I was no altar boy, certainly. A bit of a tearaway, I suppose, like a lot of lads at that age.”

  “I know absolutely nothing about fourteen-year-old boys.”

  “Well, why should you?”

  “My son’s fourteen.”

  “Your son?” He sounded astonished. “I didn’t realize you were ...”

  “A mother?” she supplied. “I know it’s hard to believe, but there you go, it’s the old story—sperm meets egg and bam. It can happen to the best of us.” She sighed. “Fourteen-year-olds are a nightmare.” She realized that she was clutching the steering wheel of the car as if she were in rigor mortis.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Archie.” What’s his name? That was a question a parent would ask, Louise thought. When Archie was born, the people who asked, “How much does he weigh?” all had babies themselves.

  Guys who weren’t fathers hadn’t been interested in Archie’s weight or what she was going to call him. So, she deduced, Jackson Brodie had kids. She didn’t want to know about that, wasn’t interested in secondhand guys with baggage. Kids were baggage, stuff you lugged around. Luggage.

  “You have kids?” she asked. Just couldn’t help herself.

  “Just one, a girl,” Jackson said. “Marlee. She’s ten. I know nothing about ten-year-old girls if it’s any consolation.”

  “Archie’s not a criminal,” Louise said as if Jackson had accused him of something. “He’s basically harmless.”

  “I nearly landed in court for stealing when I was fifteen if it’s any help.”

  “What happened?”

  “I joined the army.”

  Jeez. Archie in the army, there’s a thought.

  “This is why you’re calling?” he asked. “For advice about parenting?”

  “No. I’m calling to tell you that I’m on a housing estate in Bur-diehouse.”

  “Great name for a housing estate.” He sounded weary.

  “I’m outside a shop that’s been boarded up. I think it used to be a post office. There’s a fish-and-chip shop on one side, a Scot-mid on the other side. Single story, commercial properties, no flats above, nothing remotely residential.”

  “Why are you telling me this and should you be there in the dark on your own?”

  “That’s very gallant of you, but I’m a big girl. I’m telling you because I thought you’d like to know that this is the address that Terence Smith gave to the court this morning.”

  “Honda Man gave a false address?”

  “Which is an offense. As you know. I told you that you were an idiot to plead guilty. And by the way, no one else caught the reg-istration of the car involved in the road-rage incident, so you held up the investigation by withholding vital information.”

  “So sue me,” Jackson said. “I’ve just seen him, actually, he was trying to kill someone else.”

  “Terence Smith?” she said sharply. “Please tell me you didn’t have another go at him?”

  “No, although the police were keen to question me.”

  “Jesus, what is it with you?”

  “Trouble is my friend.”

  “He was trying to kill someone? Is that one of your fantasies?”

  “I don’t have fantasies. Not about people killing each other, anyway. If I tell you what happened, you’ll think I’m even more paranoid and delusional than you do already.”

  “Try me,” she said.

  “I saw a girl who looked like my dead girl, she even had the earrings.”

  “You’re even more paranoid and delusional than I thought.”

  “Told you.”

  “You see dead girls everywhere.”

  “No, I see the same dead girl everywhere.”

  He was officially a lunatic, she decided. Strangely, that didn’t make him less attractive. She sighed and said, “Anyway, cheers. I’m off home. Sleep well.”

  There were rules. The rules said, you don’t fool around with wit-nesses, you don’t fool around with suspects, you don’t fool around with convicted felons. And Jackson Brodie managed to be all three at once. Yes, Louise, you surely know how to pick them. And, of course, you don’t fool around with a man who already has a woman.

  At least that explained why he was in Edinburgh. “For the Festival,” he had said when she first interviewed him, but he hadn’t seemed like the Festival type. Still didn’t. But Julia was in a play.

  “What’s Julia like?”The naming of her had provoked an unexpected, visceral spasm of jealousy in Louise. Hold your tongue, bite your lip.

  “She’s an actress.”That had surprised her. He frowned when he said her name.

  Be honest. Honest was hard sometimes, even with herself. She was a natural dissembler. Even the word “dissembling” was a way of dissembling, of not just saying liar. Be honest, Louise, you fancy Jackson. Such an inane, adolescent word, “fancy.” LOUISE MONROE FANCIES GRANT NIVEN written in the school toilets in fourth year. PC Louise Monroe and DI Michael Pirie in the back of an un-marked squad car in the wee small hours of his leaving “do.” “Christ, I’ve always fancied you rotten, Louise.” The dull gleam of his wedding ring in the dark, the push and shove of unbridled lechery that kick-started Archie. How odd that babies, the absolute inno-cents at the top of the moral heap, were created out of such vul-garity. The beast with two backs. Maybe it wasn’t that she fancied Jackson exactly, maybe she just saw in him someone who had weathered the world and still had something left to give. “You can’t have it both ways,” one of her girlfriends said. “Tough and tender, men are like steaks, it’s one or the other.”Tough and tender, a con-tradiction in terms, Hegelian synthesis. Dualism, the Edinburgh disease. It was possible, Louise was sure, but perhaps only in a far-flung corner of the galaxy. Or with Jackson Brodie. Maybe.

  She had noticed a chicken-pox scar beneath his eyebrow. Archie had one in almost the same place, a tiny shield-shaped depression in the skin that she supposed would last forever.

  His dark hair was flecked with slate. At least he hadn’t done the middle-aged male thing of growing a beard to hide a double chin, not that he had a double chin. He probably wouldn’t look too bad with a beard. When she was younger she could never have imag-ined that she would find middle-aged men with graying hair or beards even remotely attractive. It just went to show. But let’s not forget Julia. Still, she was an actress and he frowned when he men-tioned her name. Two strikes against Julia.

  It was odd how you could feel so attracted to someone by the simplest things, the way they handed you a drink and said, “There you go.” The dent of a chicken-pox scar, the cast of despair on their features when they said “Julia.”

  Louise slipped her car into the garage. She remembered Sandy Mathieson saying that a garage had just sold for a hundred thou-sand. The thing about Edinburgh was that even some of the best addresses in town didn’t have garages, leaving the rich nobs stuck with the horrors of on-street parking, whereas Louise, in her modern, characterless (but still mind-blowingly expensive) estate house, had a double garag
e. Thank you, Graham Hatter. The urn that contained her mother was now sitting on a shelf in the garage, between a half-empty two-liter can of paint and a jar of nails. She gave the urn a mock salute as she got out of the car. “Hey, Mom.”

  Jellybean was waiting behind the front door to greet her. A deep thumping bass pulsated out of Archie’s bedroom. Jellybean followed her up the stairs, he had to put all four paws on a step before he could move on up to the next, it wasn’t long since he’d been like quicksilver on the stairs. The corkscrew in her heart moved a quarter turn.

  “I was a bit of a tearaway, I suppose.” “Tearaway” was a good word, she could use that next time Archie got into trouble. “Archie’s a bit of a tearaway, but he’s okay.” More and more she had this troubling vi-sion of sitting in a courtroom, watching Archie in the dock, seeing his whole life go down the pan, and her life with it. “You placed him in a nursery when he was three months old and went back to work, Ms. Monroe? You have always put your career first, haven’t you? You don’t know who his father is?” Of course she knew, she just wasn’t going to say. Harmless, my ass, she thought. He was a little shit, that’s what he was.

  She knocked on the door of Archie’s room and went in quickly, without waiting for an answer. Always try and catch suspects off guard. Archie and Hamish (damn, she’d forgotten about Hamish) were huddled around Archie’s computer. She heard Hamish’s sotto voce warning, “Incoming, Arch.”Archie turned off the computer screen as she came in the room. Porn, probably. She turned the music off. She shouldn’t do that, really. He had rights after all. No, he didn’t.

  “Okay, boys?” she said. She could hear herself sounding like an officer of the law, not a mother.

  “We’re fine, Louise,” said Hamish, giving her a big, cheesy grin. Fucking little Harry Potter. Archie said nothing, just glared at her, waiting for her to leave. If she’d had a girl they would be having little chats now, about clothes, boys, school. A girl would lie on her bed and look through her makeup, she would share her secrets, hopes, dreams, all the things Louise had never done with her own mother.

  “You’ve got school tomorrow, you should be asleep.”

  “You’re so right, Louise,” Hamish said. “Come on, Archie, time to go bye-byes.”

  Little fucker, she thought as she left the room. She walked away and then tiptoed back to listen at the door. The music remained off, and they seemed to be reading from a book, first one voice, then the other. Not porn, anyway, although they were both sniggering as if it were. Hamish’s confident tones, more masculine when incorporeal, declared, “‘You know,I think there’s more to this than meets the eye,Bertie,’ Nina said.‘Maud Elphinstone seems whiter than the proverbial driven snow, but methinks the lady doth protest too much.’” And Archie’s swooping, cracked voice said, “‘Why, Bertie, I do believe you’re blushing.’”

  Were they gay? How would she feel if her son was gay? Actually it would be quite a relief, she wouldn’t have to deal with any of that macho bullshit in the future. Someone to go shopping with, that’s what they (mothers of gay sons) always said, didn’t they? She didn’t like shopping, so that might be a bit of a problem.

  “‘I do believe you have a pash on the lovely Maud, Bertie.’”

  For a moment, when they were saying good-bye, she thought Jackson was going to kiss her. What would she have done? Kissed him back, right there in the middle of the street, like a teenager. Louise Monroe has a pash on Jackson Brodie. Because Louise Monroe was an idiot, obviously.

  34

  Gloria spent the evening at the hospital. She watched Graham closely and wondered if he was faking it, if he had decided that being dead to the world was a way of dodging all the problems that were piling up around him. “Can you hear me, Graham?” she whispered in his ear. If he could, he was keeping schtum about it.

  The colossal wreck now as weak as a kitten, as quiet as a mouse. Ozymandias toppled. “Half sunk, a shattered visage lies.” Gloria had been very fond of Shelley when she was younger. She had given Graham a beautifully illustrated Folio Society copy of the collected poems for his sixtieth birthday, on the basis that you should give a present you would like to receive yourself.

  Naturally, being Graham, he had misread the poem, seeing only the triumphal hubris of “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: / Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Gloria couldn’t think, offhand, of a present she had ever received from any member of her family that she had actually wanted. Last Christmas, Emily (“and Nick”) bought her a food mixer, an inferior brand to the one she already owned, and Graham gave her a Jenners gift token, which hardly required much thought and had probably been bought by his saleswoman-cum-mistress-cum-would-be-wife, Maggie Louden. Gloria had had no intuition that the woman standing in front of her Christmas tree, waving away a mince pie,

  was planning to be the next Mrs. Graham Hatter. “The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.”

  She drank a cup of tea that a nice nurse brought her and flicked through a copy of the Evening News that she had bought from the shop downstairs. “Police are asking if anyone saw a young woman go into the water.” Her eye was caught by the words “earrings in the shape of crucifixes.” She put her tea down and read the short piece from the beginning again. “Go into the water”—what did that mean?

  When she got home, Gloria went down to the basement to set the security system for the night. Something moved on one of the CCTV screens, a pair of eyes glowing monstrously in the night— a fox, a big dog-fox, carrying off the remains of Gloria’s supper from last night. Then, unexpectedly, the screen went blank.

  Then all the other screens went blank, one by one. No little ro-bots moving this way and that, keeping their electronic eyes on things. The lights on the alarm system flickered and went out, and then all the electricity in the house failed. This was what it would be like for Graham when he died.

  A fuse must have blown, Gloria told herself. Nothing to worry about. She felt her way in the absolute dark of the basement toward the wall where the fuse box was. Then she heard a noise. A footfall, a door opening, a floorboard creaking.

  Her heart started thudding so loudly that she thought it must be like a beacon pinpointing her position in the dark. A man had been beaten to death in Merchiston this morning—who was to say that the murderer hadn’t moved on to another suburb on the south side? She wished she had a weapon. She made a mental inventory of what was available. The garden shed provided the biggest arsenal—weed-killer sprays, an ax, the electric hedge trimmer, the strimmer—she imagined you could probably do quite a bit of damage to someone’s ankles with a strimmer. Unfortunately there was no way she could get to the garden shed without passing whoever was in the house. Did they have eyes of diamond and jet, were they as tall as a bear?

  She suddenly remembered Maggie Louden’s words: “Is it done yet, is it over? Have you got rid of Gloria?” What if she wasn’t talking about divorce, what if she was talking about murder?

  Of course, that was exactly what Graham would do! If he di-vorced Gloria, he would lose half of everything he had, and no way in the world would Graham be prepared to do that, but if Gloria died he could keep everything. It was as melodramatic a concept as anything in Emmerdale yet somehow perfectly credible. He would hire someone—Graham had a way of never getting his own hands dirty. He would pay someone to get rid of her. Or he would use Terry. Yes, that was what he would do, he would use Terry.

  Gloria held her hand over her heart in an attempt to muffle its telltale thumping. Another floorboard creaked, much closer this time, and Gloria realized that there was someone standing at the top of the basement stairs, a figure outlined faintly with an aura of moonlight from the atrium skylight in the hall.

  The figure started to descend the stairs. Gloria took a deep breath and said stoutly, “I think you should know before you come any farther that I am armed.” A lie, of course, but in these circumstances the truth was hardly a weapon. The figure hesitated, it bent down to get a bett
er view of the basement, and then a fa-miliar voice said, “Hello, Gloria.”

  Gloria gave a little scream of horror and said, “I thought you were dead.”

  35

  When Martin returned to the Four Clans, he found the prison-governor receptionist had been replaced by the night porter from last night. Hadn’t Sutherland said he was on holiday? He handed Martin his key, barely looking up from the Evening News that was spread out on the cheap veneer of the reception counter. A cigarette teetered precariously from the edge of his lip.

  “Do you remember me?” Martin asked. “Do you know who I am?”

  The night porter tore himself away from the newspaper, an inch of ash dropped from his cigarette. He glanced up at Martin and then, as if seeing nothing of interest, returned to his paper. “Yeah,” he said, turning over a page, “you’re that dead guy, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” Martin agreed, “I’m that dead guy.”

  THURSDAY

  36

  Arooster crowed. There was no better alarm clock. He remembered it was Sunday, his favorite day of the week, and he stretched all four limbs luxuriously in the bed. No need to get up and go to work. He was no longer writing, thank God, he had found an odd kind of liberation in donning a suit and tie every weekday morning and commuting up to London to toil in a con-servative office with high ceilings and big old-fashioned desks, a place where the juniors and the secretaries called him “Mr. Canning” and the chairman clapped him on the back and said, “How’s that wonderful woman you married, old chap?” He didn’t know what he did in the office all day, but at lunchtime he went out to a restaurant where the waitresses wore white broidery anglaise aprons and little caps on their heads and brought him oxtail soup and steamed puddings with custard. And in the afternoon, at three on the dot, his secretary (June, or perhaps Angela), a cheerful young woman with crisp shorthand and soft twinsets, brought him a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits.