One Good Turn

18

Louise had to spend twenty minutes waking Archie up, if she didn’t put the effort in he would still be in his bed when she came home from work. He had been in the shower for almost half an hour, she wouldn’t be surprised if he’d fallen asleep again in there, he certainly never seemed any cleaner when he came out. She didn’t like to think what other things he might be doing in there with his man/boy body. It was hard to remember that he had once been brand-new, as pink and unsullied as Jellybean’s paw-pads when he was a kitten. Now he sprouted hair and stubble, erupted in spots, his voice was on a roller coaster, swooping and plummeting at random. He was undergoing some kind of unnatural transformation, as if he were changing from a boy into an animal, more werewolf than boy.

It was almost impossible to believe now that Archie had come out of her own body, she couldn’t see how he had ever fitted in there. Eve was made from Adam’s body, but in reality men came from inside women-no wonder it did their heads in. Man that is born of woman and is but of few days and is full of trouble. Sometimes you wondered why anyone bothered crawling out of the cradle when what lay ahead was so darn difficult. She shouldn’t think like that, depressive mothers produced depressive children (she had read a clinical study), she had thought that she could be the one to break the cycle, but she hadn’t done a very good job.

She drank coffee and glared at the urn that was still sitting on the draining board. Woman is born of woman. Perhaps she could just scatter the contents in the garden like fertilizer. There was hardly any topsoil out there-thank you, Graham Hatter-so for the first time in her life her mother could perform a useful func-tion. She realized she had bit her lip until it had bled. She liked the taste of her own blood, salty and ferric. She was sure she had read somewhere that there was salt in the blood because all life began in the sea, but she found it hard to believe. It seemed po-etic rather than scientific. She thought of an embryonic Archie, more fish than fowl, curled in his watery environment, tumbling like a sea horse inside her.

She sighed. She couldn’t deal with her mother yet. “I’ll think about it tomorrow,” she murmured. The ghost of Scarlett passed through her, and she acknowledged her with a little salute. Good to see you, Ms. O’Hara.

It could have been the first murder case on which she was se-nior officer in charge, and instead it was turning out to be a mirage. The divers had gone in at first light and found nothing. She’d sent Sandy Mathieson out there to cover for her. Somehow she had known the divers wouldn’t come up with anything. She would probably get hauled over the coals for wasting money and resources. She would like the dead woman to turn up, not because she wanted a woman dead but because she would like to prove that she wasn’t a figment of Jackson Brodie’s imagination. She wanted to justify Jackson. The justified sinner. Was he a sinner? Wasn’t everyone?

Yesterday, Jessica Drummond had checked his credentials with the Cambridge police. Yes, he used to be a detective inspector with them, but he had left a few years ago to set up as a private investigator. “A gumshoe, a private dick,” Jessica snorted (she really did snort). “Boy’s Own fantasy stuff.”

Eager beaver, Louise had heard Jessica called. She was trying so hard to become one of the boys that she looked as if she might have started shaving. Compared to her, Louise felt like a great big puffy pink marshmallow of womanhood.

Worse, Jessica went on, Brodie had inherited money from a client and buggered off to retire in France.

“How much money?” Louise asked.

“Two million.”

“You’re joking.”

“No.Two million pounds from a very old lady. You can’t help but wonder how much coercion that involved. Confused old lady changes her will in favor of some sweet talker. I think there’s something wrong with our Mr. Brodie.” She tapped her forehead. “You know, an elaborate hoaxer, misses being a policeman, having a real job, sets about making himself the center of attention. A fantasist.”

“That all sounds a bit soap opera,” Louise said. “And I didn’t see any evidence of sweet-talking.” Quite the opposite, if anything. He had two million in the bank and he was traveling on buses? He didn’t look like the kind of guy who took a bus. “Not everyone has someone who’ll notice they’ve gone.” Was he talking about himself? He had looked right at her when he said it. Did he think she didn’t have anyone who would miss her? Archie would miss her. Jellybean would miss her. Jellybean would miss her more than Archie. Archie would hole up in his bedroom, playing Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, watching Punk’d and Cribs and Pimp My Ride and ordering pizza on her credit card.

But then what, when the money ran out? He was a boy who could barely open a tin of beans. If she died before her time, then Archie would be an orphan. The idea of Archie as an orphan was a kick to her heart, the next worst thing to his own death (don’t think that). But then everyone became an orphan eventually, didn’t they? She was an orphan herself now, of course, although the difference between her mother being alive and her mother being dead seemed minimal.

For Archie’s sake rather than her own, Louise hoped that she would die a natural death in her own bed when she was a con-tented old woman and Archie was completely grown-up and independent and was ready to let her go. He would have a wife and children and a profession. He’d probably turn out to be a right-wing investment banker and say things to his kids like, “When I was your age, I was a bit of a rebel too.” She would be dead but everyone would be okay about that, including Louise, and her genes would carry on in her child and then in his child, and in this way the world was stitched together.

Louise could imagine being old, but she couldn’t imagine being contented.

“Not many girls drown themselves, though, women aren’t noted for drowning.” She supposed Jackson Brodie was right. Not many women drowned, period. Louise made a mental list of women who had drowned-Maggie Tulliver, Virginia Woolf, Natalie Wood, Rebecca de Winter. True, they weren’t all real, and techni-cally speaking, Rebecca didn’t drown, did she? She was murdered, and she had cancer. The Rasputin of romantic literature-bad women need killing several times over, apparently. You could keep a good woman down but not a bad one. Louise had gone straight into the police after she graduated from St. Andrews with a first in English. Never a backward glance to academia, they had wanted her to do an MPhil, but what was the point, really? In the police you could be out there, on the street, doing something, making a difference, breaking down doors and finding small helpless children at the mercy of their drunken mothers. And you would have the power to take those small helpless children away from their drunken mothers and save them, give them to foster parents, put them in an orphanage, anything rather than leaving them at home to be a witness to their own ravaged childhood. Jackson Brodie didn’t seem like a hoaxer, but then that was the thing about hoax-ers and con men, wasn’t it, they were plausible. Perhaps he had fallen in the water and panicked, hallucinated, made something out of nothing. Invented a corpse out of malice or delusion or plain old insanity. He’d wrong-footed her at first by being so professional- his description of the body and the circumstances in which it was found was what she would expect from one of her team-but who was to say he wasn’t a pathological liar? He had taken photographs but there was no sign of a camera, he had found a card but it had disappeared, he had tried to pull a dead woman from the water but there was no body. It was all very shaky.

He could have gone over earlier, left his jacket, and then sim-ply entered the water from Cramond, but as hoaxes go it seemed very elaborate.

Or perhaps there was a dead girl, and it was Jackson Brodie who had killed her. First person to discover the body-always a prime suspect. He was a witness, yet he felt like a suspect. (Why was that?) He said he’d tried to pull her out of the water to stop her from floating off on the tide, but he could just as well have put her in the water. Deflecting suspicion from himself by being the one who called it in.

She heard Archie stumbling down the stairs, falling into the kitchen, grunting something that was almost certainly not “Good morning.” His face was raw with spots, his ham-skin looked as if it had been boiled. What if Archie didn’t undergo a transforma-tion? What if this wasn’t his pupa stage, what if this was it?

She put Weetabix in a bowl, poured milk on it, gave him a spoon. “Eat,” she said. A dog would be more capable. Being four-teen meant he had slipped back down the evolutionary ladder to some presocial rung. Some men of Louise’s acquaintance had never climbed back up again.

She wanted to talk to him about the shoplifting. She wanted to talk to him about it in a reasonable way, not losing her temper, not yelling at him, telling him what a stupid fucking idiot he was. Lots of kids shoplifted and didn’t go on to a career of crime-take her-self, for example. Although she had, of course, gone into a career of crime, it was just that she was on the good side. Hopefully.

Maybe it was regular, maybe it was only once, she didn’t know. Louise had been with him at the time, so she had to presume that it was some kind of rebellion against her, some psychological acting out. They were in Dixons in the St. James Center, celebrating her mother’s death by buying a big flat-screen TV in anticipation of the insurance money. Louise had taken out life insurance on her mother years ago, deciding she would never profit in any way from her life, so she may as well cash in on her death. It was a small policy, she couldn’t have kept up big payments on it, and once or twice it had struck her that if it had been really serious money (two million), she might have been tempted to knock her mother off. A simple accident, drunks fall down stairs all the time, after all. And a detective knows how to cover her tracks.

Archie had taken something stupid-a pack of AA batteries that he could easily have paid for. It wasn’t about paying, of course. She was at the other end of the shop when the door alarm went off, and then a security guard ran past her, pouncing on Archie as he exited, laying firm hands on a shoulder and an elbow, turning him round, and propelling him back inside. The professional part of her brain registered the catch as businesslike and efficient. The unprofessional part of her brain considered leaping on the security guard’s back and jamming her thumbs in his eyes. No one ever warned you about how ferocious mother love could be, let’s face it, no one warned you about anything.

She thought about looking helpless and throwing herself on his mercy, unfortunately looking helpless was not one of her greatest talents. Instead she marched up to the pair of them, flipping out her warrant and coolly asking if there was anything she could do. The security guard launched into his explanation, and she said, “It’s okay, I’ll take him in, have a word with him,” frog-marching Archie out of the shop before the security guard could protest, before Archie could say something stupid (like Mum). She heard the security guard shout after her, “We always prosecute!” She knew they’d be on tape and spent some anxious time afterward waiting to see if anything came of it, but nothing did, thank God. She could probably have found a way of making the tape disappear. She would have eaten the tape if necessary.

Outside, in the underground gloom of the multistory car park, they had sat together in the cold car, staring out the windshield at the oil-stained floor, the concrete pillars, the mothers hustling toddlers in and out of car seats and pushchairs. Oh, God, but she hated shopping centers. There wasn’t even any point in asking him why, because he’d just shrug his shoulders and stare at his trainers and mutter, “Dunno.”The artful dodger.

She could see that from his point of view it was unfair-she had so much power while he had absolutely none. A contraction of pain seized up her insides. Another turn of the corkscrew. That was love. As strong as the first time she touched him after he was born, lying on her chest like a barnacle, in the labor suite of the old Simpson Memorial Maternity Pavilion (now, at the new hos-pital, it was renamed “The Simpson Center for Reproductive Health,” it wasn’t the same somehow). Louise knew, at that first touch, one way or another, they were stuck together forever.

It seemed to her, sitting there in the car park, that he was as helpless now as he was then, and she wanted to turn round and punch him in the head. She had never hit him, never, not once, but she’d come close to it a thousand times, most of them in the last year. Instead she put her hand on the horn and kept it there. People in the car park looked around, thinking it was a car alarm. “Mum,” he said finally, quietly, “don’t. Please stop,” which was the most articulate thing he’d said to her in weeks. So she stopped. It all seemed a high price to pay for a desperate, drunken bout of sex with a married colleague who never even knew he’d fathered a child.

She had a sudden, unwelcome flashback to the bump and grind of Archie’s genesis. PC Louise Monroe in the back of an un-marked squad car with DI Michael Pirie, the night of his leaving “do.” He had a new promotion and an old wife, but that hadn’t stopped him. People used to think that the circumstances of a child’s conception shaped that child’s character. She hoped not.

“What?”Archie said, glaring at her, a mustache of milk around his mouth.

“Ophelia,” Louise said. “She drowned. Ophelia drowned.”

Louise went up to the bathroom and opened the window, cleaned the shower, picked up sodden towels, flushed the toilet. She wondered if he would ever be house-trained. It was blankly impossible to modify his behavior, she wondered what would happen to him under the threat of torture, perhaps she should sell him to science or the army. The CIA would find him a fascinating subject-the boy who couldn’t be broken.

She put in her contacts, applied makeup, enough to have made an effort, not enough to be blatantly a woman, a white shirt beneath a trim black suit from Next, court shoes with a slight heel, no jewelry apart from a watch and a pair of modest gold studs in her ears. She would go back out to Cramond as soon as she could, join her team to dot the i’s and cross the t’s on the case that never was, but this morning she was due to give evidence in Alistair Crichton’s court-a car scam, stealing high-end cars in Edinburgh and selling them in Glasgow with new plates. She and a DS, Jim Tucker, had worked doggedly to put a case together for the procu-rator fiscal, Crichton was an old bastard and a stickler for proce-dure and she didn’t want her appearance to get in the way of her evidence. She had done Jim a big favor last year. He had a teenage daughter, Lily, one of those clean-cut types, thick hair, lots of good orthodontic work, all her grade exams on the piano. Lily had just triumphed in her Highers and was set to go to university on a Royal Navy scholarship to study medicine, and then Louise had helped to net her in a drugs raid on a flat in Sciennes. It turned out to be just a bit of dope, sixth-years from Gillespie’s, and a couple of first-year university students, Louise had recognized Lily straightaway. They were all taken down to the station, and a couple of them were charged for possession. It was one of those jobs that looked like overkill afterward, lots of shouting and breaking down of doors, and in the confusion Louise had armlocked Lily and walked her out of the flat and hissed in her ear, “Scarper,” and more or less pushed her down the stairs, into the night, and into her safe, high-achieving future.

Jim was a good sort, he was so grateful he would have cut off a limb and presented it to her in a glass case if she’d asked. Lily must be honest beyond the call of duty because she told her father about it, Louise couldn’t imagine herself owning up at that age. Any age, come to that. Louise wouldn’t have said anything to Jim about the bust, didn’t think it was nice to tell tales. The way she looked at it, if Jim ever found himself in a similar situation with Archie, Archie would have a get-out-of-jail-free card and at least one member of the Lothian and Borders Police on his side. Two if you count his mother, of course.

She emptied half a packet of Tic Tacs into her mouth, and she was as ready as she ever would be.