Graham’s Memory Stick contained a lot of the humdrum of commerce—feasibility studies, projected figures, tight margins. The world seemed full of so many vague concepts, but you had to wonder—were these actually important? (Were they even real?) Shouldn’t a person’s life be based on simple, more tangible things—a bed of sweet peas staked in a garden border, a child on a swing, a certain slant of winter light. A basket of kittens.
There was a dismayingly large cache of e-mails that Graham had saved from Maggie Louden, little electronic billet-doux of the “My darling, what we have is so wonderful” type. Tatiana read, in a drawling vampiric accent that rendered the sentiments ludicrous, “Have you talked about the divorce with Gloria yet? You promised you would talk to her this weekend.”
Attached to one of the e-mails was a folder of photographs, some of Graham and Maggie, although mostly of Maggie alone, taken by Graham, presumably. Gloria couldn’t remember the last time that Graham had taken her photograph.
“Voddabitch,” Gloria said.
He had taken Maggie to York Races for Ladies Day, an outing that Gloria herself had suggested to Graham as something they might do together, “a day out.” Maggie and Graham had stayed at Middlethorpe Hall (“Really lovely, darling.You are a god”). He had bought her a pink diamond—“Gorgeous,gorgeous,gorgeous.It’s huge! (Like you!) Someone’s going to get a treat tonight!”
His e-mails to her tended to be more prosaic. “The new ‘Ivan-hoe’ is going to be a four-bedroom terrace, integral garage, we’re trying to nail down sales before construction begins. Make a point of the laundry room. It’s a big selling point.” Everything was business, even love.
Gloria couldn’t have a pink sink, but his mistress could have a pink diamond as big as the Balmoral. It seemed a shame now that Graham’s imminent demise might rob Gloria of the satisfaction of watching him squirm in the divorce courts. Half his income, half his business.
“Half of nothing, Gloria,” Tatiana said to her. “Remember, Proceeds of Crime Act 2002.”
Somehow Gloria wasn’t surprised that Tatiana was up to date with the criminal justice system.
“It’s all there, Gloria,”Tatiana said, and she was right, it was— the false accounting, the illegal bank transfers, the shell companies, the tax evasion. The money that Graham had passed through Hatter Homes’ accounts, not just for himself but for other people— the man was a money launderer for hire, washing and scrubbing away at the filthy lucre as if it were a vocation. There were codes and passwords for bank accounts in this country and in Jersey, in the Caymans, in Switzerland. The breadth and sprawl of it all was astounding. He owned the whole world.
“He owns Favors?” Gloria asked, squinting at the screen. “With Murdo?”
“Everything is business, Gloria. Business and lies. You’re old woman, you should know that by now. Move,” she commanded. Gloria shifted out of her seat, and Tatiana took over at the computer, her hands poised above the keyboard like those of a virtu-oso pianist about to commit the performance of her career.
Gloria was intrigued. “What exactly are you doing? Are you transferring money? Into the housekeeping account?” she added hopefully.
“If I tell you, I have to kill you,” Tatiana said. She was like a comedy Russian. Gloria wondered if she really was Russian. There was no reason why she should be who she said she was. No rea-son why anyone should be who they said they were. People believed whatever they were told. They believed Graham was in Thurso. In the future, the future that was just beyond the path edged with antirrhinums and salvias, Gloria could be whoever she wanted to be.
Tatiana burst out laughing, slapped Gloria on the arm (quite hard), and said, “Just joking, Gloria. I’m moving it into one of the Swiss accounts. Take fraud cops forever to find it, long after other accounts are frozen, and by then you and me”—she snapped her fingers in the air—“pouf! We are gone.”
“But how will we get the money out?” Gloria puzzled.
“Gloria, you are such idyot! It’s Hatter Homes’ account, you’re director of company, you can take what you want out. You’re im-portant businesswoman.You better phone them and tell them we’re coming because this is lot of money. Don’t worry, Gloria. remember, I work in bank.”
The doorbell rang. It was Pam.
“This isn’t really a good time,” Gloria said.
“Your security gates are wide-open,” Pam said, walking into the hallway. “Anyone could walk in. I’m just on my way back from the Book Festival.” She made her way, without being invited, into the living room and sat on the peach-damask sofa. Gloria followed, wondering how to get rid of her, perhaps she could just snap her fingers and pouf!—she would be gone.
“I have to say, you didn’t miss much,” Pam said. “As events go it was very unsatisfactory, it managed to be both argumentative and lackluster at the same time. And I wasn’t convinced by the filled rolls. Dougal Tarvit was all right, but as for Alex Blake, what a disappointment.”
“Oh?”
“So short. Definitely something suspicious about him. I’m surprised the police don’t have him in custody yet for Richard Mott’s murder.”
“Oh?”
“I bought you a signed copy.”
“Oh?”
“Stop saying ‘oh,’ Gloria, you sound like a walking zero. Are you going to put the kettle on? I hear poor old Graham got stuck in Thurso.”
The doorbell rang again. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Gloria said.
“Inspector Brodie,” the man said, stepping forward and shaking her hand.
“An inspector calls,” Gloria said. She presumed he was a fraud officer, but didn’t they hunt in packs? He followed her into the living room. She wished she had kept him on the doorstep, like a Jehovah’s Witness. All these unwanted visitors were an unwelcome distraction from the international banking fraud that Tatiana was committing in the kitchen, overseen by Gloria’s red KitchenAid and Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course.
“Tea?” Gloria offered politely, trying to remember if he had shown her any ID. Where was his warrant card? He was saying something about road rage when Tatiana glided in from the kitchen and said, “Hello, everybody,” like a poor actress in a farce.
“Oh,” Pam said.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” the policeman said to Ta-tiana. “People will begin to talk.”
Whatever else might have been said after that was never spoken because Graham’s golem chose that moment to put in the French windows with a baseball bat, and Pam started screaming as if she were trying to summon all the demons out of hell, and she didn’t stop screaming until the stranger appeared in the garden and shot the golem in the heart.
45
Jackson hadn’t intended to impersonate a policeman, yet when the door was opened and he said, “Mrs. Hatter?” and she said, “Yes,” it came out automatically. It had seemed the most natural thing in the world to say “Inspector Brodie.”
Gloria Hatter was dressed in a red tracksuit that reminded him, in a distant pocket of his memory, of Jimmy Savile on Jim’ll Fix It. Luckily she wasn’t wearing a medallion or smoking a cigar. She seemed to think he was with the fraud squad, and he didn’t go out of his way to disabuse her of this notion.
When he mentioned the Honda and the road-rage incident, she said, “I didn’t see anything,” and he said, “You were there as well?” in disbelief. A vaguely familiar woman with orange hair was sitting on the sofa, holding a copy of Martin’s latest book, The Mon-key Puzzle Tree. That detail alone sent Jackson’s brain spinning. Boxes within boxes, dolls within dolls, worlds within worlds. Everything was connected. Everything in the whole world.
The phone rang and an answering machine somewhere kicked in. A woman’s hysterical voice that could have been announcing an alien invasion shouted, “Gloria! It’s Christine! They’re here.They’re taking the computers!”
Jackson was distracted from this message by Tatiana’s entrance. He thought, This is too much, it really is. When Honda Man, complete with
baseball bat, appeared at the French windows like a character in a horror movie and created air where previously there had been glass, Jackson began to wonder if he was on some new kind of reality television show, a cross between Candid Camera and a murder-mystery weekend. He half-expected a presenter to leap out from behind the sofa in Gloria Hatter’s living room and shout, “Surprise! Jackson Brodie, you thought you found a corpse in the River Forth, you thought you witnessed a man being assaulted with a baseball bat, you thought this little Russian lady here whispered clues in your ear (Yes! She doubled as that mysterious corpse), but no, it was all a fiction. Jackson Brodie, you are live in front of an audience of millions. Welcome to the future.”
They were all here, Tatiana, Honda Man, the only person missing was Martin. But, lo, he had thought too soon because here came Martin, striding with more purpose than hitherto across Gloria Hatter’s admirably well-kept lawns. “And also starring Martin Canning as the deceptively bumbling writer!”
Tatiana shouted something in Russian that sounded like a curse, while Gloria Hatter, less dramatically, said, “Terry, what on earth do you think you’re doing?”
“He’s gone!” he shouted at her. Spittle flew out of his mouth, reminding Jackson of his dog. “Mr. Hatter, he’s done a runner. He’s left me to carry the fucking can, hasn’t he?” And then, with one easy motion, he swung body and bat and smashed a glass display cabinet that contained a host of animal ornaments. The man really liked the sound of breaking glass. He turned back to the room and hesitated for a moment, as if unsure what to choose next, time enough for Jackson to herd Gloria Hatter and her or-ange-haired friend behind the sofa (where there was no TV presenter, thank goodness).
Terence Smith seemed to notice Jackson for the first time, and a frown settled on his dumpy features. “You?” he puzzled. “Here? Why?”Then he spotted Tatiana. “And you as well?”He lifted the bat again and swung it in Tatiana’s direction. Jackson made a dive for her, a rather inept rugby tackle, trying to bring her down and shield her with his body. Terence Smith caught him midair with a fierce smash at the waist so that Jackson folded in half as if he were hinged, and dropped to the carpet. A nice carpet, he noted, one of those thick Chinese ones with a pattern that looked as if it had been sculpted. He had a very close-up view of it. If he turned his head slightly, with great difficulty and much pain, he could also see Martin—still walking purposefully toward the house, his arm stretched straight in front of him as if he were leading a cavalry charge. At the end of the arm was his hand (as you would hope), and in his hand a gun. The Welrod. The Welrod that had puzzled Jackson when Martin mentioned it this morning.
Jackson thought, Well,okay. It was designed for covert close-up work but was still capable of being lethal at a distance, but only in the hands of someone who knew how to shoot because the sight on a Welrod was primitive. And you only got one shot because by the time you’d managed to reload you’d be either dead or arrested. And Martin was, let’s face it, a bungler, he was bound to be a crap shot.
The sight of Martin was too much for Honda Man. The wheels in his brain seemed to grind to a halt, apparently from the effort of trying to work out why all the people he wanted to kill were in the same room together. Then he gave up on the whole thinking thing and turned his attention to Jackson. If he had to make a start somewhere, his expression seemed to imply, then it may as well be on the one already on the ground, groaning in agony. He raised the bat. Jackson rolled over into a fetal position and tried to protect his head with his hands. He wondered vaguely what the other people in the room were doing while he was waiting to have his skull broken open. Surely Tatiana could do something useful with her knife? And failing that she could rip open Terence Smith’s throat with her teeth. She was doing neither, he could hear her on the phone, speaking in Russian very fast. He wondered what she was saying. Send lawyers, guns, and money? The woman with or-ange hair was screaming. She was doing the right thing. A lot of noise would bring the police. That would be good.
He was in a cocoon, isolated from the normal rules of time. His own personal end of days, counting every last lamb. He was back at home, the dimly lit kitchen of a small terraced house— the past was always dimly lit in his memory, he wondered if it was because the poor used low-wattage lightbulbs—he was sitting at a table, his brother and sister on either side of him, his father newly scrubbed from the pit, his mother dishing up some kind of stew. His sister’s lovely hair was in plaits (“pleats,” his father called them), his brother’s face was pale and open, he was wearing the same secondary-school uniform that Jackson would wear in a few years. Not Candid Camera but This Is Your Life. It was just a mo-ment, quite ordinary, the woman pouring milk from a jug. They ate their tea, their mother sat down when they’d finished and ate scraps. His brother hit him on the back of the head, and he rec-ognized it was Francis’s way of being affectionate even though it hurt. His mother said something to him, but he couldn’t catch what it was because something the size of a house fell on him at that moment. Jackson smelled blood and gunfire, the unmistak-able scents of the battlefield. All he’d heard was a tiny thuck kind of sound. You had to hand it to the Welrod, when they said “si-lenced” they meant silenced. It wasn’t a house that had fallen on top of him, it was Terence Smith, felled like big game, and now crushing him to death. Jackson wondered if he could get a new rib cage when all this was over.
Grunting with the effort of it, he rolled the rhinoceros weight off and pulled himself up to a sitting position (great difficulty and much pain, etc.) and looked at his watch. It was an automatic reaction, an echo of other times, other places—Time of death... the suspect entered the premises at... the incident was logged at... a quarter to eight but high noon for Jackson. Julia’s show was due to start in fifteen minutes. His whole day had piv-oted on that one appointment. “But you’ll be finished in time for the show?” His watch, he noticed groggily, was spattered with blood.
Tatiana lit a casual cigarette and took Terence Smith’s pulse.
“Is dead,” she said, somewhat unnecessarily. He wasn’t just dead, he was outstandingly dead, his heart ripped open by a bullet.
“Bull’s-eye, Martin,” Jackson murmured. Who would have thought Martin had it in him to be a crack shot? Tatiana came over to Jackson and knelt down next to him. She peered at him and said, “Okay?”
“In some ways.”
“You save my life,” she said.
“I think it was that guy over there that saved you,” Jackson said. Martin was still standing on the lawn with the gun slack in his hand, aimed at the grass now. He seemed very calm, like someone who’d made peace with himself. Jackson heard a siren and thought, That was quick, but Gloria Hatter said, “Panic button,” in a matter-of-fact way to no one in particular.
Tatiana leaned closer to Jackson. Her eyes had that dreamy look he remembered from the circus. She kissed him on the cheek and said, “Thank you.” He felt strangely privileged, as if a wild animal had allowed him to stroke it.
Jackson didn’t really care one way or the other that Terence Smith was dead. Maybe he’d seen too many dead people to get upset about another one, or maybe it was just that Honda Man was a bad piece of work and there wasn’t enough room on the planet for the good people, let alone all the bad ones. There were starving people, tortured people, just plain poor people who could do with his oxygen. He wasn’t the only one in the room to be un-perturbed by Terence Smith’s passing. “Eye for an eye,” Gloria Hatter said with magnificent indifference. The only person who seemed upset by what had happened was the woman with orange hair, who was whimpering quietly on the sofa.
Jackson heaved himself onto his feet and approached Martin cautiously. Close-up, he had a panicky, wild look in his eye. From past experience Jackson had found it best to treat panicky, wild-eyed guys like scared animals, they might be essentially harmless but they could still kick and bite.
“Stand easy, Martin,” he said gently. “Come on, now, give me the gun.” Martin handed the gun
over without any hesitation. “Sorry,”he said. “Sorry about that.”Then his knees gave way, and he collapsed in a sad little heap on the lawn so there was only Jack-son, Welrod in hand, standing over Terence Smith’s dead body when the first officer on the scene arrived.
“This looks bad, doesn’t it?” Jackson said.
46
Louise turned in to the Hatter Homes’ car park at their head-quarters on Queensferry Road. Some kind of flunky in a uniform came toward her to question her right to be there, and she slapped her warrant card against the windshield and nearly mowed him down. Real Homes for Real People. How had Jackson found out there was a connection between Hatter Homes and Terence Smith? She would bet her bottom dollar that he was on the hunt. Was there ever such a troublesome man?
She was single-handed. Both Jessica and Sandy Mathieson had succumbed to the “flu.” Before she came here she had swung by the Four Clans, but there had been no sign of Martin Canning. The CD was hidden now, safely slipped inside an old Laura Nyro CD. She figured that was the last place anyone would look.
When she got inside, she found the Hatter Homes’ offices were in chaos. She recognized a couple of guys from fraud. One of them said to her, “No sign of Hatter anywhere.”
“Have you tried his house?” she asked, and the guy from fraud said, “Next on our list. The wife’s the other director, she’s in deep shit as well.”
She went looking for the woman behind the man, Hatter’s sec-retary (“Christine Tennant”), who immediately started whining, “I haven’t done anything. I know nothing. I’m innocent.” The lady was protesting a little too much, in Louise’s opinion. She remembered the crack that was running down the middle of her house. If nothing else, Hatter was a rotten builder. There was a fruit basket on Christine Tennant’s desk. Louise could read the card tied to it with a ribbon. It said, “Just a little token of apprecia-tion. Best wishes, Gloria Hatter.”
One Good Turn Page 35
