One Good Turn

by Kate Atkinson

  His mother put her arm round him and said, “It’s okay.”And it was, briefly. He finished her chips for her and let her stroke his hair, but then her phone rang and she sighed, “Sorry, that was the Force Command Center. I have to go, there’s been an incident,” and she’d left him alone. With the dead cat. Other mothers didn’t do that.

  He heard her car pulling out of the garage and looked out the window to watch her drive away. A twenty-pound note floated past slowly, like a small magic carpet.

  “Fuck’s sake, Archie, police!” Hamish yelled at him, giving him a shove from behind so his arms windmilled around as he tried to keep his balance and not fall on his face. Hamish was off, running down George Street, abandoning Archie to his fate. He turned and saw two stocky policemen approaching. He didn’t even bother trying to run. He walked toward his fate. It was a moment he’d been walking toward for months, mostly what he felt was relief.

  53

  Nina Riley climbed, hand over hand, like an agile spider on the rust-red web of girders of the Forth Bridge until finally, slick with sweat from the effort, she made it up to the railway tracks. She had no idea where Bertie was. Perhaps he had fallen to his death in the gray waters down below. She felt remarkably unper-turbed by his fate. He had been such an annoying boy, so obse-quious (“Miss Nina, you’re topping, you really are”). He needed a hefty dose of socialism or a good kick up the backside.

  She looked up and down the tracks, no sign of a train. No sign of the Earl of Morybory, or whatever he was called. Her so-called archenemy. No sign of the circus troupe of clowns that had been dogging her steps for days. A faint cry interrupted her thoughts. It sounded like Bertie. Was he calling for help? She listened intently. A feeble “Help me, Miss Riley” drifted toward her on a stiff estu-ary breeze. She ignored it. Then a far-off rumbling noise. A train. It was time. She lay down on the tracks carefully, she didn’t want to dirty her new cream leather trench coat, although, of course, it was probably going to get ruined anyway.

  She stretched herself as nice and straight as a railway sleeper across the tracks. If you were going to do something, do it prop-erly. It was a shame there was no one about to tie her to the tracks with rope. It would be good to finish on a Hollywood note. Or perhaps not, that wasn’t quite her style and she wasn’t a damsel in distress, she was a modern woman doing the sensible thing. The noble thing.

  The train was louder now. Closer.

  Sacrifice. Self-sacrifice, to be more exact. She was doing this for Martin. She was going to free him of her forever. She was going to take Alex Blake with her into oblivion, and Martin would be liberated, he could have a fresh start, write something good, for heaven’s sake, instead of this nonsense. Regrets, she had a few, of course. She had never had sex—Martin wouldn’t let her. And she had never been to Wales, she had always wondered what it was like, now she would never know.

  A little flicker of something she’d never felt before crossed her features. She thought it might be fear. No going back now. This was it. The nanosecond that would change everything. It was coming. It was here.

  She entered the blackness where there were no words. Let there be dark.

  “And he just sits there and says nothing?”

  “Mm. More or less.The police said when they arrived he was gibbering about wanting to go into holy orders.”

  “‘Gibbering’? Is that a clinical term?”

  “Very funny. I haven’t made an official diagnosis yet, but I would say that he’s in some kind of post-traumatic catatonia, a fugue state. He shot someone, killed someone. None of us really know how we would react in those circumstances.”

  “Do you think he’s faking it? He’s a writer, isn’t he?”

  “Mm.”

  “What kind of things does he write?”

  54

  Jackson phoned Louise from the car. He had rented a Mondeo from Hertz and was driving down to London. It seemed he wasn’t ready to go back to France yet. Maybe he would never be ready. He was running, gunning for the county line at ninety miles an hour with his taillights out. He was heading for the Canadian border. He was on the dusty back roads of Texas looking for a little trouble. He was every song he had ever listened to.

  He tried the word “home” in his head and it didn’t sound right somehow. “Home is where the heart is,” Julia said. Not usually a cliché kind of girl, but then she had never lived down to his expectations of her. He would have said his heart was with Julia, but maybe he had just thought that to make himself feel better, to make himself feel less alone. “I’m sorry, Jackson. It’s not yours.” He had said he didn’t care, that it didn’t make any difference who the father was, and he shocked himself because it was true, but Julia said, “Well, it makes a difference to me, Jack-son.”And that was that, it was over between them. From naught to sixty in one conversation. “It’s better this way, sweetie.” Was she right? He honestly didn’t know. What he did know was that he felt as if something had been ripped out of him without anaes-thetic. And yet he was such an old dog now that he was just carrying on because that’s what you did, you picked yourself up off the ground and, against all the odds, kept on slugging. Bring it on.

  But really he wondered if his heart hadn’t been buried with his sister all those years ago while he sat at Mrs. Judd’s worn Formica-topped table eating a chicken pie.

  New frontier, new future. London, the home of the dispossessed of the world, seemed like a good place to get lost and found in for a few days. In a service station in the Borders he bought a three-disk set of Tamla Motown greatest hits. He hadn’t suddenly changed his musical allegiance, but he thought it might be a good idea to have something upbeat for the road, and you had to hand it to those guys (although, as ever, he preferred the girls), they cer-tainly knew how to spin a tune. He couldn’t believe what a relief it was to be in a car, in the driver’s seat, behind the wheel. Even in a Mondeo. He felt like himself again.

  “Hello, you,” he said when she answered with a rather tart “De-tective Inspector Louise Monroe.”There was a beat of silence on her end of the phone. The Velvelettes finished looking for a nee-dle in a haystack without finding one, then she said, softer than usual, “Hello you, back.”

  “I’m on the road,” he said. (Four wonderful words.) “I’m sorry I didn’t get to say good-bye.”

  “So your work here is done and all that?” she said. “The mys-terious stranger leaves town, looking back long enough to light a chewed-up cigar and wonder what might have been, before digging in his spurs and galloping off.”

  “Well, actually, I hate to disappoint you but I’m just passing the Angel of the North in a rented Mondeo.”

  “And Smokey’s singing the blues.”

  “Yeah. Something like that.”

  “You have to come back.”

  “No.”

  “You impersonated a police officer. You left a crime scene.”

  “I was never there,” Jackson said.

  “I have witnesses who say you were.”

  “Who?”

  Louise sighed. “Well, one witness is dead, obviously.”

  “Our friend Terry.”

  “Another one is asking to be taken to a monastery.”

  “That would be Martin, then.”

  “But the third one is pretty coherent now, apparently,”Louise said.

  “The third one?”

  “Pam Miller.”

  “The woman with orange hair?”

  “Well, I would say it was more peach, but yes. Wife of Murdo Miller, her husband runs a huge security outfit. He’s a crook but semirespectable.”

  “What about the other two women? Gloria Hatter and Tatiana.”

  “Gone. Did a bunk. Like you. Mrs. Hatter’s wanted by the fraud boys. And Graham Hatter seems to have disappeared off the face of the planet. Everyone’s very agitated by this case.”

  “You’re running it, then?” he asked. “Your first murder?” It sounded odd, like a child’s primer.

  “No.”
She was silent for a while, like a criminal weighing up the options of confessing. “Actually.”

  “Actually?”

  “I had to leave as well. Personal stuff.”

  He tried hard to remember her son’s name. He made a stab at “Archie?”

  “No. My cat.”

  He didn’t respond to that in case he said the wrong thing (he’d learned something from being with Julia for two years). “So four peo-ple left the scene of the crime?” he puzzled. “That must be a record.”

  “It’s not funny.”

  “I didn’t say it was.”

  “An astonishing thing happened that I thought you’d like to know about.”

  “Astonishing things happen all the time,” Jackson said. “We just don’t notice.”

  “Oh, please. You’ll be telling me you believe in angels next and everything that happens is meant. They got Terence Smith for Richard Mott’s murder.”

  “Everything that happens is meant.”

  “You don’t sound as surprised as I would have liked.”

  “I’m surprised, trust me.” He wasn’t, he had received a phone call, no more than a murmur in his ear, a murmur with a Russian accent. He had no idea how, but Tatiana seemed to know everything. He wondered—if you had sex with her, would she kill you afterward? He thought there was a possibility that it might just be worth it.

  “Jackson?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your Terence Smith was a one-man crime wave.”

  “He wasn’t mine.”

  “He was also your basic moron, left trace evidence everywhere. The tech boys got bits of Richard Mott’s blood and brain matter from the baseball bat. He had Mott’s phone in his pocket, and when they searched his flat they found Martin Canning’s laptop, which is where he got his address from, I suppose. So it looks like he killed Mott by mistake, that he might really have been looking for Canning after all. Revenge for throwing his briefcase at him, I suppose, but he got Richard Mott instead. Who knows.”

  “This is all very neat,” Jackson said.

  “Well, not that neat. We still haven’t found anything to connect him to your nonexistent dead girl, nothing in his flat or in the Honda.”

  “She exists, believe me. Terence Smith killed her on Graham Hatter’s orders. He used Hatter’s car to dispose of her—find that, and you’ll find the evidence. Hatter’s probably sipping cocktails with Lord Lucan now in South Africa or wherever murderers on the lam hide out these days.”

  “And this is all on the word of a Russian call girl who no one except you has ever met. Oh, and Gloria Hatter. Who is also on the lam, as you put it. There is nothing to link either Terence Smith or Graham Hatter to the girl. A girl who, I should emphasize, no one has missed.”

  “I know people who miss her,”Jackson said. “She was named Lena Mikhailichenko. She was twenty-five years old. She was born in Kiev. Her mother still lives there. She was an accountant back in Russia. She was a Virgo, she liked disco, rock, and classical music. She read newspapers and crime novels. She had long blond hair and weighed 122 pounds and was five foot five inches tall, she was a Christian. She was good-natured, kind, thoughtful, and optimistic, they all say opti-mistic. She liked to read and go to the theater, she also liked going to the gym and swimming, and she had a completely misplaced ‘confi-dence in tomorrows,’ so perhaps her English wasn’t as good as she claims. I think that’s another way of saying ‘optimistic’ again. And parks. They all like parks, in fact they all say more or less the same thing. You can see a picture of her at www.bestrussianbrides.com, where she’s still up for sale although she left Russia six months ago to see if Edinburgh’s pavements were paved with gold. That was when she fell in with Favors and met her nemesis in the shape of Graham Hatter. I think if you look you might find that our Mr. Hatter was involved with Favors, as well as God knows what else.”

  “You don’t give up, do you? You have to come back.”

  “No.”

  “Jesus, Jackson.”

  “No. I’m tired of being involved. I’m tired of being a witness.”

  “Martin needs you to give evidence on his behalf, he killed someone. He saved your life. He’s your friend.”

  “He’s not my friend.” There was a long pause. The Supremes asked him to stop in the name of love. “Anyway,” he said.

  “Anyway.”

  “Well, don’t forget,” Jackson said, “we’ll always have Paris.”

  “We never had Paris.”

  “Well, not yet,” Jackson said. “Not yet.”

  55

  Sophia’s Scottish boyfriend pounced on her as she came through the door, tugging on the zip at the front of her pink uniform. He found the pink uniforms vaguely pornographic, as if Barbie had de-signed her ideal nurse’s uniform. Sophia wore hers very short, and he often wondered if there were men in the houses she went to who spent their time trying to get a glance up her skirt as she bent over or reached up. When he thought of her at work, feather dusters tended to be involved as well as leaning provocatively across beds or kneeling on floors to scrub them with her pert Czech arse in the air.

  “Wait,” she said, pushing him away.

  “Can’t,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about this moment all day.”

  She wanted to take her jacket off, have a glass of red wine, eat beans on toast, wash her face, put her feet up, do a hundred things that were higher up on her list of priorities. She’d had to work an extra hour today. “New practices,” the Housekeeper told them. The Housekeeper was new too, the mean-faced Scottish House-keeper had disappeared overnight, and now they had a tetchy Mus-covite bitch in her place. Favors was “under new management.” Sophia didn’t think much of the new regime. She thought it might be time to stop working, go home to Prague, take up her real life again. She imagined herself in the future, a top international sci-entist, living in the States, handsome husband, a couple of kids, imagined looking through the photographs that recorded her stay in Scotland—the Castle, the Tattoo, hills and lochs. She might remove the photographs of her Scottish boyfriend so that her Amer-ican husband didn’t feel jealous. On the other hand, she might not.

  “Come on,” her Scottish boyfriend moaned at her, tugging at her clothes. Sometimes when he was in the mood there was just no putting him off.

  It was when he was pushing her pink uniform up around her hips that she felt something uncomfortable sticking into her back and said, “Hang on,” to him so that he groaned and rolled over on his back, his big pale Scottish penis sticking in the air like a flag-pole. She had nothing to compare it with, this being her first Celt, but she liked to imagine that this was what all Scotsmen were hiding under their kilts—even though the other maids shrieked with more knowledgeable laughter when she said this.

  She found the source of her discomfort in one of the pockets of her jacket. The doll. One of the writer’s matryoshka. She had a vague memory of picking it up amid the horror of his house. It was a small one, although not the baby. She opened it, pulling it apart. Like an egg, there was a secret inside. She frowned at it.

  “Sony Memory Stick,” her Scottish boyfriend said. “For a computer.”

  “I know,” she said. Sometimes he forgot that she was a scientist from a sophisticated European capital city, sometimes he behaved as if she farmed potatoes back in the Middle Ages. The Memory Stick had a label on it. Death on the Black Isle.

  “Greg upstairs has a Sony,” he said enthusiastically, his flagpole already limp and forgotten. He liked everything to do with comput-ers. “We can see what’s on it. It must be important if it was hidden.”

  “I don’t think so,” Sophia said. “It’s just a novel.” But she was quite relieved when she heard him thundering up the stairs to Greg’s flat. At least now she could kick her shoes off and get a glass of wine. She remembered the writer’s house, how it was before the terrible thing happened in it. She could almost smell the roses in his hallway.

  56

  The body washed up a secon
d time at Cramond, as if the girl were determined to come back again and again to the same place until someone took notice of her. The pathologist at the scene thought she might have been strangled (“Postmortem lividity on the neck”), but they would have to wait for the postmortem to know anything more certain. Three days in the waters of the Forth surfing up and down the coastline hadn’t done her any favors. Not quite Ophelia, washed down the stream, garlanded with flowers.

  Cramond was under the flight path for Edinburgh Airport, and Louise wondered what they looked like from the air, little spiders scurrying around with no purpose, or a well-drilled army of ants working together? From the single policeman who had responded to the call, the number of people had expanded exponentially in the course of an hour. Her team, her case. Her first murder. They had found Hatter’s car parked in the long-stay car park at Edinburgh Airport, Jackson had been right, the boot was swarming with DNA, hopefully they would find matches to their corpse. Sooner or later they would find Graham Hatter.