One Good Turn

15

He had let her go. He had heard Marlee’s voice in his ear saying, “Daddy,” quietly as if she were treading water next to him, and he had relinquished his dead mermaid and kicked for shore. Helping hands had hooked him out of the harbor and taken him into the Cramond Inn, where a malt whiskey and a bowl of hot soup had brought him back to life. By the time the police arrived, he was wrapped in blankets and his clothes were being washed and dried in industrial machines somewhere in the recesses of the building.

Then he had begun the seemingly never-ending process of telling and retelling his story to a succession of people. “Have you been drinking, sir?” the first uniformed constable on the scene asked him, looking pointedly at the glass in his hand that had just been refilled. Jackson would have considered hitting him if he could have summoned up the energy. Another reluctant part of him acknowledged that the guy was just doing his job.

The final person to arrive (“This is actually my day off,” he heard her say to someone) was a detective, a woman, with more attitude than manners. She gave him her card, which had printed on it DETECTIVE SERGEANT LOUISE MONROE, the “Sergeant” crossed out in Biro and replaced with a handwritten “Inspector.” He thought that was quite funny. A newly minted inspector. He hoped she didn’t have anything to prove. She also asked if he had been drinking.

“Yes, I have been drinking,” he said, showing her the now half-empty glass. “So would you under the circumstances.”

“Don’t make assumptions,” she said sharply. She was pretty, sort of. Her mouth was a little too big for her face and her nose a little too small and she had a crooked front tooth, but she was still pretty. Sort of. Late thirties, dark hair, dark eyes, Jackson had never had much luck with blondes. Her hair was in a bob, neat and practical, and she tucked it behind her ears every so often in a gesture that Jackson always found appealing. In women, anyway. It was a remote and far-flung outpost of his brain that was making this appraisal. For the most part he was just trying to stop himself from falling asleep from exhaustion.

She liked asking questions. What was he doing on Cramond Is-land, had he realized the tide was coming in when he set out, how had he got here?

“Bus,” he said reluctantly. He felt as if he were owning up to being a lower life-form. He was naked beneath the blankets, and he felt absurdly vulnerable. A naked man who took buses and had nothing better to do with his time than lurk around suspiciously on deserted islands. With the tide coming in. How stupid was he? Very, obviously.

What was he doing in Edinburgh? He shrugged and said he was here for the Festival. She gave him a skeptical look that made him feel as if he were lying, he obviously didn’t look the Festival type. He thought about saying, “My girlfriend’s in a play, she’s an actress,” but really that was nobody’s business but his own, and “girl-friend” sounded stupid, girlfriends were what young guys had. Jackson tried to think what he would have been doing if he’d been in charge of the investigation, would he be as suspicious of his own credentials as Louise Monroe was or would he already have divers out on police launches, uniforms combing the coastline?

“Most people are upset when they find a dead body,” Louise Monroe remarked. “ ‘Shock’ and ‘horror’ are the usual reactions, yet you seem remarkably phlegmatic, Mr. Brodie. Have you seen a dead body before?” What did she think-that he’d mistaken a seal for a woman, a lump of driftwood for a body?

“Yes,” he said, weariness finally making him snap, “I’ve seen hundreds of dead bodies. I know exactly what a dead body looks like, I know what a body looks like when it’s been blown up, burned, hung, drowned, shot, stabbed, beaten to death, and hacked to pieces. I know what people look like when they’ve stood in front of a train going at a hundred miles an hour, when they’ve been decomposing inside a flat for the whole of a summer, and when they’re three months old and they’ve died in their sleep for no apparent reason. I know what a dead body looks like, okay?”

The butch DC accompanying Louise Monroe looked as if she were getting ready to handcuff him, but Louise Monroe nodded and said, “Okay,” and he liked her for that. “Police?” she said, and he said, “Ex. Military and civil-Cambridge.” Name, rank, and number, tell the enemy nothing else.

Somewhere back at Force Command, she told him, someone must have decided there was a chance the woman was still alive, and the coastguard had sent out an RNLI launch as well as alerted an RAF helicopter. “So you can stop fretting, Mr Brodie.” “Fretting” wasn’t exactly the word he would have used himself.

“It’s pointless,” he said, “she was dead.” Every time he said it, she seemed to slip farther away.

“Has anyone reported a girl missing?” he asked. There were always girls missing, always had been, always would be. There were no women or girls reported missing who fitted the description he had given, Louise Monroe said.

“Well, she probably hasn’t been reported yet,” Jackson said. “She hadn’t been in the water long. And sometimes it takes a while for people to realize that someone isn’t where they should be. And sometimes people are never missed. Not everyone has someone who’ll notice they’ve gone.” Who would miss him? Julia, Marlee, that was it. Without Julia there would be just Marlee.

“Have you got the egg with you? In your pocket, maybe?” she said.

Jackson frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I just wondered if you had it with you-the egg you’re going to teach me to suck.” She was a spiky little thing. Not that little, taller than Julia, but then everyone was taller than Julia.

Jackson wondered if she had someone at home who would notice if she was gone. No wedding ring, he saw, but that didn’t mean anything. His own wife (ex-wife) had never worn a ring, never even changed her name to his, yet, interestingly, on the back of her Christmas card last year there had been one of those little address labels that unequivocally declared MR. AND MRS. D. LASTINGHAM. Jackson had faithfully worn his wedding ring, he had taken it off only at the end of last year, throwing it into the Seine from the Pont Neuf on a weekend visit to Paris. He had meant it to be a dramatic gesture of some kind, but in the end he had let it fall quietly, a brief glint of gold in the winter sun, embarrassed at what people might think (sad middle-aged loser whose divorce has finally come through).

“Could be suicide,” he speculated. (Yes, apparently he did have the egg with him, although she was no grandmother.) “Not many girls drown themselves, though, women aren’t noted for drowning. Maybe she simply fell into the water, perhaps while she was drunk. A lot of drunk girls around these days.”

One day, undoubtedly, his daughter, Marlee, would be drunk. Statistically she would smoke cigarettes in her adolescence. Take drugs at least once, have a near miss in a car. Suffer a broken heart (or several), give birth twice, get divorced once, have an illness, need an operation, grow old. If she grew old she would have osteoporosis and arthritis, shuffle along with a walking stick or a shopping cart, need a hip replaced, watch her friends die one by one, move to a nursing home. Die herself.

“Mr. Brodie?”

“Yes.”

By the end of the afternoon a lot of hardware had buzzed around the area, the RAF, the RNLI, a police launch, a Port Authority pilot vessel, plus a lot of manpower-all to no avail. They found zilch, not even the camera he’d left behind when he went into the water, although they had recovered his jacket (thank you), which at least proved he had been on the island because even that seemed to be in question.

“Well, at least you didn’t imagine that,” Louise Monroe said. She smiled, she had a crooked smile that took the edge off any congeniality.

“I didn’t imagine any of it,” Jackson said.

Consider the first person on the scene as a suspect. That was what she was doing. It was what he would do. “What was the purpose of your visit to Cramond, sir?” What could he say-loafing? That he was at a permanently loose end? He thought about saying, “I understand I’m one of you,” but he wasn’t, not anymore, he wasn’t part of the coterie anymore. The club. And part of him-a perverse part, undoubtedly-was curious to know what it was like on the other side. It had been a long time since he’d visited that other side, Jackson’s criminal career started and ended when he was fifteen and was caught breaking into the local shop with a friend to nick cigarettes. The police caught them and hauled them off to the station and frightened the life out of them.

“There was a card,” he said suddenly to Louise Monroe. “I’d forgotten. It was a business card. Pink, black lettering, it said-” What did it say? He could see the card, he could see the word, but he couldn’t read it, as if he were trying to decipher something in a foreign language or a dream. Feathers? Fantasia? And a phone number. His good memory for numbers, just about all he had a good memory for nowadays, seemed to have deserted him. “The name began with an ‘F,’ ” he said. He couldn’t remember what he’d done with the card, you would have thought he would have put it in his jacket pocket, but there was no sign of it.

“We didn’t find a pink card when we were on the island,” Louise Monroe said.

“Well, you weren’t looking for one, were you?” Jackson said. “It wasn’t exactly big.”

“You photographed a dead body?” the butch DC said suddenly, giving him a “you crazy psycho” look.

He thought of the pictures inside the camera, the little jewellike compositions of Venice with Julia in all her loveliness, nestling next to pictures of an unknown corpse. “Of course I did,” he said.

The butch DC was named Jessica-something, he missed her surname when she introduced herself. “Jessica” was a girly name for a girl who wasn’t girly. “Sure this wasn’t a bit of a prank, Mr. Brodie?” Jessica-something said. He ignored her, the name was on the tip of his tongue, feathers, fantasia, fandango-“Favors!” he said suddenly, that was it, that was what had been written on the missing card.

As he was leaving, he heard Louise Monroe requesting the assistance of police divers. He wondered how pissed she was going to be at him if she found nothing. A lot, probably. A uniformed constable gave him a lift back into town, to Julia’s venue, where he discovered the actors taking a break from the dress rehearsal.

Julia, now wan rather than flushed, came outside with him, where she smoked a cigarette with a frightening kind of purpose, her inhalations punctuated by rasping breaths. “Tobias is a pillock,” she said angrily. She was nervy and talkative, where earlier she had been quiet and subdued. “And you know Molly?”

“Mm,” Jackson said. Of course he didn’t.

“The neurotic one,” Julia said (not very helpfully, they were all neurotic as far as Jackson could make out). “Doesn’t know her lines. She’s still on the book.”

“Really?” Jackson said, trying to strike a note of mild outrage at the idea of someone being “on the book.” He wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but he could take an educated guess.

“It was all over the place today, thank God we’ve got previews tomorrow. Did you get my text about the ticket for Richard Mott?”

So that was what her text had said. The name “Richard Mott” was vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t put a face to it. “How come you had a free ticket?” he asked.

“I had a drink with him at lunchtime. He gave me one.”

“Just you?”

“Yes. Just me.” He clearly remembered her having no time for lunch. “We’re going to have to work through lunch.” Jackson frowned.

“Don’t worry,” Julia said, “Richard Mott’s not my type.”

“I’m not worried.”

“You’re always worried, Jackson. It’s your default setting. You could meet up with me afterward. We’re going to be hours yet.” Julia sighed and stubbed her cigarette out and as an afterthought said, “How was your afternoon?”

Jackson considered all the things he could say (I nearly drowned today, I found a corpse, I sparked a huge, futile air-sea search, oh, and the police think I’m a paranoid delusional nutter) and chose, “I went to Cramond.”

“That’s nice, did you take photos?”

“I lost the camera.”

“No! Our camera? Oh, Jackson, that’s awful.” He felt an unexpected swell of emotion when she said “our camera” rather than “my camera.”

He supposed from Julia’s point of view that it was awful, but compared with everything else that had happened to him this afternoon, he found it hard to get worked up about it. “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry.”

He accompanied her back down to her inner circle of hell and watched her walk onstage and take her place in an angst-strewn scene where she had to spend ten minutes staring at a black square that, at that moment (it was a multifunctional piece of scenery), was representing a window opening onto a raging Arctic storm- a fact that Jackson knew only because he had spent some time in London doing lines with Julia. He reckoned he could have understudied for her if necessary (now that would be a nightmare). There was something noble and tragic in the mute pose she adopted. With her sackcloth and disordered hair, she looked like the survivor of something terrible and unspeakable. He wondered if, when she was doing scenes like that, she was thinking about her own past.

He turned abruptly on his heel and potholed his way out of the building. The sound of a police siren somewhere in the distance made his heart leap with the old familiar thrill. When the helicopter and launches had arrived at Cramond, he had badly wanted to take control, it had been hard watching Louise Monroe being the one with all the power. Twice in one day he had observed women younger than himself wielding more authority. Nothing to do with them being women (his only precious child was a girl, after all), more to do with Jackson not being a man. A real man. Real men didn’t accept money off dead old ladies and live in France. He missed his warrant card, he missed his child, he missed his iPod, which he had accidentally left behind. He missed the sad-voiced women who let him share their pain. Lucinda, Trisha, Eliza, Kathryn, Gillian, Emmylou. Most of all he missed Julia, yet she was the one thing he had with him.

Without anything better to do than lie in an empty bed and think about what he didn’t have, he went and picked up his ticket for Richard Mott.

Jackson remembered Richard Mott from the eighties, he hadn’t found him funny then and he didn’t find him funny now. Neither did most of the audience, apparently-Jackson was shocked by how vicious some of the jeering and catcalling was. He dropped off a couple of times, but the circumstances were hardly conducive to sleep. When Richard Mott finished to grudging applause, Jackson thought, There goes another hour of my life. He was too old now, too aware of the finite nature of what was left to squander precious time on crap comedy.

He slipped away as quickly as possible and made his way down to the subterranean depths of Julia’s venue, only to find it dark and empty. One day he would find a Minotaur in there. Julia had said they would be hours, but there was no sign of anyone. He turned his phone back on and found a text from Julia, saying, “All done, see you back at the flat.”

He discovered a fire exit and made the mistake of leaving the building through it so that when he hit the street, he had no idea where he was. He had read in National Geographic (he had recently taken out a subscription, thereby incontrovertibly confirming his middle-aged status) that it had been proved by geneticists that women navigated by landmarks, men by spatial indicators. It was dark, and lacking any spatial indicators, he tried looking for landmarks, searching for the shape of the Royal Mile, for the skyline of spires and crowstepped gables culminating in the pomp and circumstance of the Castle. He looked for the massy bulk of the museum on Chambers Street. He looked for the spans of the landlocked bridges, but all he found was the mouth of a dark alley, a narrow close that led to an endless flight of stone steps. He could see lights at the top, and a street still humming with Festival-goers, and he set off without thinking much beyond This looks like a shortcut. A “snicket,” that’s what he would have called it when he was a boy. Different language, different times.

Jackson was forever warning Marlee (and Julia, come to that, but she never listened) about the foolishness of going down dark alleys. “Daddy, I’m not even allowed out in the dark,” Marlee said reasonably. Of course, if you were a girl, if you were a woman, you didn’t need to go down a dark alley in order to be attacked. You could be sitting on a train, stepping off a bus, feeding a photo-copier, and still be plucked from your life too soon by some crazy guy. Not even crazy, that was the thing, most of them weren’t crazy, they were just guys, period. Jackson would have been happier if the women in his life never left the house. But he knew even that wasn’t enough to keep them safe. “You’re like a sheepdog,” Julia told him, “every last lamb has to be accounted for.”

Jackson himself wasn’t afraid of dark alleys, he thought he prob-ably posed more of a threat himself in a dark alley than anyone he was likely to encounter, but obviously he hadn’t reckoned on Honda Man. The Incredible Hulk on steroids in all his pumped-up glory, barreling out of nowhere and staggering into Jackson with all the grace of a rugby prop. Jesus Christ, Jackson thought as he hit the ground, this was some kind of town. The Minotaur was out of the labyrinth.

He got to his feet instinctively, never stay down, down means kicked, down means dead, but before Jackson could even get a ra-tional thought up and running-Why? would have been a good one to start with-Honda Man had slammed him with a punch like a battering ram. Jackson heard the air leaving his own body with a kind of ouf! sound before he slumped to the ground. His diaphragm turned to stone, he immediately lost interest in rational thought, his only concern had become the mechanics of his breathing-why it had stopped, how to start it again. He managed to get on all fours, like a dog, and was rewarded by Honda Man stamping on one of his hands, a bitchy kind of move, in Jackson’s opinion, but it hurt so much he wanted to cry.

“You’re going to forget about what you saw,” Honda Man said.

“Forget what? What did I see?” Jackson gasped. Full marks for trying to have a conversation, Jackson, he thought. On all fours and still talking-give this man a medal. He blew out air and sucked it in again.

“Don’t try to be fucking clever, you know what you saw.”

“Do I?” In reply, Honda Man gave him a casual kick in the ribs that made him recoil in agony. The guy was right, he should stop trying to be clever.

“I’m told that you’ve been causing a fuss, Mr. Brodie.” (The guy knew his name?) Jackson thought about saying that he hadn’t been doing any such thing, that, indeed, he had actively refrained from saying anything about the road rage to the police and had no interest at all in being a witness, but all that he managed to say was “Uh,” because one of Honda Man’s heavy-duty boots gave him another hefty nudge in the ribs. He had to get up off the ground. You had to keep getting to your feet. All the Rocky films seemed to pass before his eyes in one go. Stallone shouting his wife’s name at the end like he was dying. “Adrian!” The Rockies I-V contained important moral lessons that men could learn to live by, but what did they teach you about fighting impossible enemies? Keep going, against the odds. When there was nothing else to do, all that was left was seeing it through to the end.

Honda Man was squatting like a sumo and taunting Jackson by making gestures with his hands as if he were helping him reverse into a parking space, the universal machismo mime for Bring it on.

The guy was twice his size, more like an unstoppable force of nature than a human being. Jackson knew there was no way he could fight him and win, no way he could fight him and live. He suddenly remembered the baseball bat. Where was it? Up his sleeve? No, that would be ridiculous, a magician’s trick. They circled round like street-fighting gladiators, keeping their weight low. Honda Man obviously had no sense of humor, because if he had, he would have been laughing at Jackson for behaving as if he had a chance against him. Where was the baseball bat?

The other thing Jackson always tried to impress on Marlee- and Julia-was what you had to do if you were attacked because you’d been foolish enough to ignore his advice in the first place and go down the dark alley.

“You’re at a disadvantage,” he tutored them. “Height, weight, strength, they’re all against you, so you have to fight dirty. Thumbs in the eyes, fingers up the nostrils, knee to the groin. And shout, don’t forget to shout. Lots of noise. If worst comes to worst, bite wherever you can-nose, lips-and hold on. But then shout again. Keep shouting.”

He was going to have to forget fighting like a man and fight like a girl. Navigating like the fairer sex hadn’t worked for him, but nonetheless he went for Honda Man’s eyes with his thumbs-and missed, it was like jumping for a basketball hoop. He made it to the nose somehow and bit down and held on. Not the most disgusting thing he’d ever done, but close. Honda Man screamed- an unearthly storybook-giant kind of sound.

Jackson let go. Honda Man’s face was covered in blood, the same blood that Jackson could taste in his own mouth, coppery and foul. He took his own advice and shouted. He wanted the po-lice to come, he wanted concerned citizens and innocent by-standers to come, he wanted anyone to come who could stop the madman mountain. Unfortunately, the shout attracted the dog, and Jackson remembered that it wasn’t the baseball bat he needed to worry about-it was the dog. The dog that was making a bee-line for him, its teeth bared like a hound from hell.

He knew how to kill a dog, in theory anyway-you got hold of its front legs and just pulled it apart, basically-but a theoreti-cal dog was different from a real dog, an enraged real dog, packed with muscle and teeth, whose only ambition was to tear your throat out.

Honda Man stopped screaming long enough to give the dog its orders. He pointed at Jackson and yelled, “Get him! Kill him!”

Jackson watched in mute, paralyzed horror as the dog leaped in the air toward him.