One Good Turn

by Kate Atkinson

Let the punishment fit the crime. She had attended a particu-larly rousing amateur production of The Mikado at the King’s last year. She was very fond of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, at least the better-known ones. Some things were obvious—a man who kicked a dog to death, for example, should himself be kicked to death, preferably by dogs, but that wasn’t really possible, the anatomy of a dog didn’t lend itself to kicking. Which said a lot about dogs, if you thought about it. Gloria would be happy to undertake the kicking herself, if necessary. But as for Graham—what would be a suitable punishment for him?

  Perhaps he should be forced to sit (or, better still, stand like a Victorian clerk) in an airless, windowless office all day, shuffling his way through endless sheaves of papers—insurance claims, VAT returns, tax returns, double accounting ledgers—all of which he would have to fill in accurately and truthfully by hand. Or, better still, he would have to stand all day and all night for the rest of time counting other people’s money without ever being allowed to pocket so much as a farthing for himself. Gloria missed far-things, the littlest coin with the littlest bird on it.

  She gave the brazier one last poke. Perhaps she should cremate Graham after all, just to make absolutely sure that he couldn’t come back.

  In the paper (she must cancel the newspapers, they weren’t healthy) there was an article about a court case—a teenager had broken into an old people’s home and stolen wallets and purses and watches from the rooms, and then he had taken an old woman’s pet budgerigar from its cage, wrapped Sellotape round and round its body, and then thrown it out the window—five floors up. And this was civilization! How satisfying it would be to wind that teenager in Sellotape and throw him out a fifth-floor window. Was there no one meting out justice in this world? Were the yobs and the magpies and the Grahams and the kitten-eating men and the budgie-taping teenagers just going to get away with it?

  Upstairs in her bedroom, Gloria pushed aside the black plastic bag of twenty-pound notes in her wardrobe and retrieved a little-worn red velour “leisure suit” that had been stuffed in the back of the wardrobe after only one outing because Graham had despised it at first sight, saying it made her look like a giant tomato. She regarded the image reflected back to her by the vast mirrors of the built-in wardrobes. A touch of the tomato, it was true, and it made her arse look enormous, but it covered her matronly bosom and iguana belly, and it was comfortable and rather jaunty, the sort of thing a sporty Mother Christmas might have worn. Graham had never liked her using words such as “arse,” he said a woman should be “ladylike,” like his own mother, Beryl, who, before she acquired her sponge-brain syndrome, had always referred to her rear end as her “derrière,” possibly the only French word she knew.

  “Arse, arse, arse,” Gloria said to her mirrored behind. The red velour suit felt soft and snug, she imagined this was how babies felt in their clothes. She put on the trainers she had bought for her “Nifty Fifties” class, still more or less box-white and unsullied. As she made her way downstairs, she felt lighter on her feet, as if she were ready for something. Ready to run.

  Gloria sighed. She could hear Graham’s whiny secretary, Chris-tine Tennant, speaking to the answering machine again. “Graham, you’re really needed here!” Gloria picked up the phone and said, “Christine, what can I do for you?” adopting the efficient tones of a woman who had worn heels and little business suits instead of slipping off a bar stool and following her prospective husband like a dog.

  “The Fraud Unit has been here again,” she said. “They want to question Graham. He’s not really in Thurso, is he?” she added, sounding sad rather than bitter. “He’s betrayed us all, hasn’t he? He’s run off and left everyone else to face the music.”

  “I don’t know, Christine.” She replaced the receiver. She almost felt sorry for Christine, all those years of faithful service and nothing to show for it. Perhaps she could send her flowers or a fruit basket. A fruit basket was a nice thing to receive.

  The man from the security company emerged unexpectedly and molelike from the basement. “There’s something wrong with the sensors on your gates,” he announced, with more histrionics than seemed strictly necessary to Gloria. “I’ve got your screens back up, and your panic buttons, but I’ll have to come back later with new parts. I don’t know what’s been going on down there.”

  He was a short man, with many of the character problems of short men, Gloria noticed. He drew himself up to his full pompous height and said, “You haven’t let anyone suspicious in, have you?”

  “Why would I let anyone suspicious in?” Gloria puzzled.

  This didn’t appear to be a satisfactory answer to him, and with a promise that he would be back later, he strutted his way down the garden path like a cock of the walk. A robin hopped along the path in the opposite direction, man and bird ignoring each other. The path was edged with borders of summer bedding plants—an-tirrhinums and salvias, neither of which were to Gloria’s taste, but Bill had been an old-fashioned kind of gardener and she hadn’t liked to request of him anything more avant-garde in the way of horticulture. If she were to stay in this house, she would plant archways of roses and honeysuckle. Row after row of sweet peas. But she wasn’t staying.

  The strong aroma of coffee hit Gloria’s nostrils, and she followed its vapor trail, like an addicted Bisto Kid, back inside the house. It led her to the kitchen, where Tatiana was sitting at the table, smoking and reading the newspaper. She tapped the head-line (MASSIVE MANHUNT SPARKED BY MURDER OF FRINGE COMIC) with a painted fingernail and said, “Lot of bad people about.”

  Tatiana had slept and breakfasted in a serviceable pair of Gloria’s pajamas but had now changed into something more sophisti-cated. She wore a pair of dainty shoes, “Marc Jacobs,” she said, displaying her foot and admiring it, and was dressed in simple black trousers and a silk print top, “Prada,” she said, stroking it. “Prada is truth,” she added, blowing smoke up toward the ceiling. “I know many truths, Gloria.”

  “Really?” Gloria said. “You’d better be careful, then.”

  Gloria’s heart had nearly stopped when Tatiana walked into the basement last night. “I thought you were dead,” Gloria said to her, and Tatiana laughed and said, “Why would you think that? Front door isn’t locked,” she added. “Someone can kill you in your bed, Gloria.”

  “I’m not in my bed,” Gloria said, following her up the stairs and into the kitchen, where she fumbled in a drawer for candles and matches. Before she could find either, the power came back on.

  “It said in the newspaper that the police thought a girl who was wearing crucifix earrings might have drowned.”

  “Ah, yes,”Tatiana said. “Wasn’t me.”

  “Who was it?”

  “You didn’t call me, Gloria,”Tatiana said, ignoring the question, her mouth making a little moue of disappointment.

  “I didn’t know I was supposed to.”

  “I gave you phone number.”

  Gloria had given her phone number to a lot of people in her time and never expected any of them to call her back. Tatiana started raking through cupboards looking for something to eat, and Gloria had sat her down and fixed them both toasted sand-wiches. When she finished her sandwich, Tatiana lit a cigarette and tore into a satsuma. Gloria had never seen anyone eat fruit and smoke at the same time. She made smoking look so enjoyable that Gloria wondered now why she had ever given it up. Something to do with pregnancy, but, really, had that been a good enough reason?

  “Graham has a mistress,” Gloria said.

  “Ah, yes, Maggot,” Tatiana said. “Voddabitch. He’s going to leave you.”

  “Is it done yet, is it over? Have you got rid of Gloria? Have you got rid of the old bag?” Not planning to kill her but to leave her, which was a relief. “He should live so long,” Gloria said.

  Tatiana had lost interest in the conversation, she stretched and yawned and said, “I have to go to bed now,” so Gloria had put her in Emily’s old room, where she snored like a trooper mo
st of the night before waking up and asking for bacon sandwiches “with pickles. You have pickles?”

  “Just Branston,” Gloria said.

  It wasn’t every day that a strange Russian dominatrix appeared out of nowhere and prowled around your house. Gloria followed Ta-tiana into the living room and watched her pick up and inspect several ornaments, the Moorcroft seemed to meet with her approval but not the Staffordshire figures, particularly the pair of 1850 creamers in the shape of a cow that she judged “vile.” She inspected the fabric of the curtains, sniffed the flowers, tested the chairs for comfort. Gloria wondered if she howled at the full moon.

  Tatiana proceeded to play with the Bang and Olufsen remote control, particularly taken with the button that turned the lights on and off, before stopping her pacing to scrutinize herself in the mirror. Then she picked an apple from the fruit bowl, and while she ate it (very loudly) she went through every station on the radio, pausing only to turn the volume up for Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.”And on and on and on. “This is great song,” she said.

  Gloria was fascinated. It was like being stuck in a cage with a restless and opinionated animal. Tatiana seemed utterly foreign in all ways. If you had sliced into her with a knife (although it was more likely to be the other way round), Gloria suspected she would have tasted of raw reindeer meat and smoky black tea and the iron tang of blood. Someone else’s.

  Finally, Tatiana threw herself on the sofa and blew air out of her mouth as if she were about to die of boredom. She scrutinized each of her fingernails in turn before giving Gloria a level gaze and saying, “Okay, Gloria. Shall we make a deal?”

  Gloria had never made a deal in her life. She stood at the French windows and watched a huge wood pigeon, built like a cargo plane, waddling across the lawn. She turned back to look at Tatiana, another kind of wildlife, lying on the sofa and working her way through the channels on the television.

  “A deal?” Gloria said. “What kind of a deal?”

  40

  “Crime Writers for Lunch,” as if they were going to be eaten by their audience. “Lunch” was coffee and filled white rolls, which were free and served from a bar at the back of the Spiegel-tent. And the writers were the entertainment. Dancing bears. They used to teach bears to dance by putting the cubs on hot coals. That was humanity for you. Martin had seen a bear—not a dancing one—in St. Petersburg. It had been with its owner, out for a walk on a lead, a brown bear as big as a big dog, on a small area of grass near the Neva. A couple of people were photographing it and then giving money to the man. Martin supposed that was why the man had the bear, to make money, everyone was trying to make money in St. Petersburg, teachers with no pensions selling books, gnarled old babushkas selling bits of knitting, girls selling their bodies.

  The book event was being chaired by a gaunt woman whose credentials for chairing the event seemed vague, but in her intro-duction she claimed to be a “huge fan” of “genre writing,” and, “What a wonderful privilege it was to have a group of such di-verse writers with us this lunchtime.” Clap, clap, clap, hands raised high toward the three of them, a little geisha bow of obeisance.

  Martin was sharing a platform with two other writers. One was an American woman by the name of E. M. Heller who was on a book tour, “trying to break into the British market,” and who wrote violent, edgy books about serial killers. In person, Martin had expected her to be precise and severe, dressed in black with a hint of Harvard about her, but she turned out to be a slightly frowsy blonde from Alabama with yellow teeth and a general air of sloppiness. When she spoke she put her hand in front of her mouth, Martin thought it was because of her yellow teeth, but she turned to him and said, “I don’t want to open my mouth, they’ll all hate my accent,” which came out more like “Ahdantwanopnma-marth, theyolol hayet maacksent.” “No, they won’t,” Martin reassured her. But they did.

  Their little trio was completed by Dougal Tarvit, who lived up north, on Nina Riley’s patch, and who wrote “psychological thrillers” that were loosely based on real-life crimes. Martin had tried reading a couple but was put off by the fact that nothing really happened in them.

  The Spiegeltent was full. Martin supposed the large audience was due to the economics of it—free food, and three writers for the price of one—but in the lull before they began, it slowly dawned on him that he was the subject of the attention. People were talking to one another about him, quite loudly in some cases, as if he weren’t actu-ally present. He distinctly heard a tightly querulous Morningside voice say, “But I thought he was dead,” in a way that implied that the female owner of the voice had been cheated by his live appearance.

  E. M. Heller leaned across and said, “Hey, Alex, are you okay, honey?”

  Martin reassured her that he was. “My real name’s Martin,” he added. What did E. M. Heller call herself, he wondered. Not “Em,” surely?

  “No.” She laughed. “It stands for ‘Elizabeth Mary’—two queens for the price of one, my mama used to say, but people call me ‘Betty-May.’ ”

  “Christ,”they both clearly heard Dougal Tarvit mutter, “it’s like being trapped inside fucking Steel Magnolias.”

  Tarvit, slumped in his chair as if languor and bad posture were the marks of masculinity, seemed to hold his two fellow writers in contempt—E. M. Heller for being a woman and Martin for writing “populist shite,” words that were actually thrown in Martin’s direction in the course of what turned out to be a dismayingly quarrelsome sixty minutes. (“Well, the scalpels seem to be out today,” the gaunt woman said, glancing nervously around as if marking possible exits from the Spiegeltent.)

  “I thought this was just a reading,” E. M. Heller whispered to Martin. “I didn’t realize it was a debate.”

  “It’s not supposed to be,” he whispered back. Dougal Tarvit glared at them both. Martin regretted now that he had refused Melanie’s offer to fly up. If nothing else, his agent was good for a scrap. Dougal Tarvit was all polemical bluster and would have been no match for Melanie. If slicing him with her tongue didn’t work, she would have beaten him to death with her bare fists.

  “He’s just jealous,” Betty-May whispered to Martin. “You being involved in a real-life murder and all.”

  “If you could each just read for ten minutes,” the gaunt woman said to them before they began, “then there’ll be time for lots of questions at the end.”

  The audience was predominantly middle-aged and female, as usual at these events, although Dougal Tarvit’s scathing presence had attracted a younger, mostly male, element. Martin’s typical au-dience was almost exclusively women who were older than he was. He looked for Jackson and saw him standing near the bar, straight backed with his hands in front as if he were going to stop a penalty shot. All he was missing was the black suit and the ear-piece to make him look like a presidential Secret Service agent. Jackson was standing very still, alert like an intelligent sheepdog, but his eyes roamed restlessly round the room. He had the reassuring demeanor of someone who knew what he was doing. Martin felt an absurd twinge of pride in Jackson’s professionalism. He was the right stuff.

  “Nothing’s going to happen to you on my watch, Martin,” Jackson said laconically. Martin thought people said that only in films.

  Betty-May read first, too fast and too breathless. The poor woman was stopped three times, twice by members of the audi-ence asking her to “speak up” or “speak more clearly” and once by a mobile phone suddenly playing the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth.

  Tarvit, on the other hand, hammed it up like an old pro. His reading introduced the element of dramatic tension to his books that Martin hadn’t found on the flat page. He read for a long time, much longer than his allotted ten minutes, Martin glanced surreptitiously at his watch and found only naked wrist, he still wasn’t accustomed to it not being there. What had Richard Mott felt in the last minutes and seconds left to him? It didn’t bear thinking about. Why had the person who killed Richard Mott phoned him? Was he go
ing to come back and kill him as well? Had he intended to kill him all along and only just realized that he got the wrong person?

  Martin’s stomach growled so loudly that he was sure everyone must have heard it. It was a bit much to have to sit there and watch other people eat, especially when he’d had nothing so far today. Betty-May pressed a mint into his hand and gave him an encour-aging yellow-toothed smile.

  Tarvit had the audience in thrall so that when he finished there was a collective sigh of deflation as if they wanted him to carry on. Please,no, Martin thought. The gaunt woman came onto the plat-form again and said, “That was wonderful, Dougal, a pretty hard act to follow, but I’m sure Alex Blake will try to live up to the challenge.” Thanks, Martin thought. “If you could cut it a bit short, Alex,” she murmured to him.

  When it came to question time, hands shot up everywhere. Young people, student types, ran around with microphones, and Martin braced himself for the usual questions (Do you write with a pen or a computer? Do you have a daily routine?). Of course, he had once been on the other side of the platform, asking just those questions of the writers he admired. “Mr. Faulks, who have been your literary influences?” I was that reader, Martin thought glumly. He was beginning to wish he had never crossed over.

  But to his horror there were a barrage of questions aimed at Martin’s newfound notoriety—“What does it feel like to be at the center of a real-life murder investigation?”“Has it put your own work in perspective?” “Was it true that Richard Mott was decapitated?” The gaunt woman stepped in anxiously. “Perhaps these aren’t appro-priate questions, and I really don’t think we should be talking about what is, after all, an ongoing police investigation. Let’s have some questions about the work, shall we? That’s what we’re here for, after all.”All the questions about the work were for Betty-May and Tarvit, not for Martin, except for a stout and insistent woman who wanted to know whether his faith helped his “creativity” or was it the other way round? (“Hard to say,” Martin said.)