One Good Turn

23

Louise surveyed the corpse on the slab dispassionately. She considered it best to leave her emotions at the door when it came to postmortems. There were a lot of programs on television these days in which the police and the forensics all banged on about how a dead body wasn’t just a dead body, it was a person. The pathologists were always addressing the deceased as if they were alive (“Who did this to you, sweetheart?”), as if the victim were suddenly going to sit up and give them the name and address of their killer. The dead were just dead, they weren’t people anymore, they were only what was left over when the person was gone forever. The remains. She thought of her own mother and reached for the Tic Tacs.

The mortuary was crowded with the usual suspects, a photog-rapher, technicians, forensics, two pathologists-a Noah’s Ark of postmortem specialists. Jim Tucker was standing off to one side, Louise knew he had a poor stomach for this kind of thing. He saw her and frowned, surprised that she was there. She gave him a thumbs-down signal and saw him mouth, “Oh, shit.”

Ackroyd, the pathologist, caught sight of her and said, “You’ve missed a lot of the good stuff, stomach, lungs, liver.”Ackroyd was a bit of a pillock.

The second pathologist on the sidelines acknowledged her with a little nod and a smile. She’d never seen him before. Only the most routine postmortems were done with one pathologist, two were considered necessary “for verification.” One and a spare. “Neil Snedden,” he said with another smile as if they were at a so-cial event. Was he flirting with her? Over a corpse? Nice.

“You here for her?” he asked, nodding at the woman on the slab.

“No, I need a word with Jim-DS Tucker.”

The dead girl looked unhealthy, more unhealthy than just straightforward dead. Ackroyd hefted her heart in his hand. An assistant, a girl named Heather, if Louise remembered correctly, hovered nearby, holding a metal pan like a baseball mitt, as if the pathologist might be about to toss the organ in her direction. When it was placed, rather than thrown, on the dish, Heather took the heart away and weighed it as if she were intending to bake a cake with it.

Louise reached out and touched the back of her hand against the nerveless one of the girl. Warm flesh against cold clay. The quick and the dead. She had a sudden memory of her mother at the undertaker’s, her face like cold, melted candle wax-the Wicked Witch of the West. Jim Tucker raised an inquiring eyebrow in her direction, and she gestured him to one side.

The dead woman’s clothing was on a nearby bench, waiting to be bagged and taken to forensics at Howdenhall. The bra and pants weren’t a matching set, but they both displayed Matalan labels. This was why you should wear matching underwear, Louise reminded herself, not for the off chance of a sexual encounter but for eventualities like this. The dead-on-a-fishmonger’s-slab sce-nario where the whole world could see that you bought your oddly matched underwear in cheap shops.

“Working girl, found in a doorway on Coburg Street. Drug overdose. Vice knew her,” Jim Tucker said. He dropped his voice. “What happened?”

“Crichton threw the case out on a technicality. Nonappearance of a witness.”

“You’re joking? He could have held off, asked us to find the witness.”

“We’ll go to appeal,” Louise said. “It’ll be fine.”

“Shit.”

“I know.” Something caught her eye, on the bench with the clothing-a little pile of business cards sitting on a petri dish. “What are these?”

“Found in her pocket,” Jim Tucker said. “The lady’s calling cards.”

Pale pink, black lettering. FAVORS. A mobile number. Just like Jackson Brodie had said.

“We thought maybe a call-girl agency,” Jim Tucker said. “We’ve not been able to get anything from the phone number.”

“She’s got a call girl’s calling card but you think she’s a street girl?” Louise puzzled.

“She was a druggie, I’m guessing it didn’t really matter to her whether she was in a hotel room or a doorway.”

Louise didn’t think that was true for a minute. If she was selling herself, she’d rather be doing it in a nice, warm hotel room, knowing someone knew where she was. “I’ve been looking for Favors myself, we’ve come up with nothing so far.”

“Something I should know about?” Jim Tucker asked.

“Not really. A missing girl, but I’m not convinced she existed in the first place.”

“Ah, your so-called dead body yesterday. I heard you called out all the troops for nothing. She hasn’t turned up?”

“Not yet.”

“What was that I heard about a body in Merchiston?”Ackroyd shouted across to her.

“No idea,” she said. “That’s Edinburgh South, nothing to do with me.”

“I live in Merchiston,”Ackroyd grumbled.

“There goes the neighborhood, Tom.” Neil Snedden laughed. He winked at Louise. Louise wondered if she could have sex with someone who was so twinkly in the face of death. She supposed it would depend how good-looking he was. Snedden wasn’t remotely good-looking.

Ackroyd took out a small electric saw and began to slice the top of the girl’s head off as if it were a boiled egg. “Look closely,” he said to a green Jim Tucker, “this is the only time you ever really get to see what’s inside a woman’s head.”

The sight of Jackson Brodie walking out of the Sheriff Court this morning had given her a start. That little flip-flap to the telltale heart.

Louise wondered what Jackson Brodie had been like when he was fourteen. Did he have all his virtues (and drawbacks) in place by then, could you have looked at the boy and seen the man in him? Could you look at the man and see the boy?

The pink cards existed. Louise had the proof in her pocket, the top one swiped from the pile while everyone was looking at Ackroyd performing his party piece. Okay, so it was tampering with evidence, but it wasn’t as if it were the only card. At the end of the day, what did it matter if there was one less? Really?

She phoned Jeff Lennon, he was the guy at the station who knew everything. A DS a few weeks away from retirement, the face of a tortoise, the memory of an elephant. Handicapped by a bad knee, he was seeing out his last days doing a reluctant catch-up on paperwork, and she knew he would be glad of an excuse to do something else.

“Do me a favor?” she asked him.

“If you ask nicely.”

“Nicely. Can you find out about a road-rage incident in the Old Town yesterday? The attacker drove off, can you check that someone caught the registration?” Jackson said there were “dozens of other witnesses,” but when Jeff phoned back a few minutes later, it was to report that no one had remembered, although “someone thought the car was blue.”

“Well, I’m the bearer of good news,” she said. “Blue is correct, and what’s more it was a Honda Civic, and I can give you a reg-istration, I’ve got a witness.” She had called him “Jackson” to his face. It had felt unprofessional, even though it wasn’t.

“Jeff? One more wee favor? Get me an address for a Terence Smith, in court this morning.”

Jim Tucker had a dead girl carrying around with her a card for Fa-vors. Jackson Brodie had a dead girl carrying around with her a card for Favors. Jim’s girl was definitely a prostitute of some ilk, therefore there was a good chance that Jackson’s girl was too. She realized that she was thinking about Jim Tucker and Jackson Brodie as if they were equals. Write out ten times, Jackson Brodie is not a detective. He was a witness. A possible suspect as well, even if the charge was only wasting police time. And he was certified guilty of assault, even if he claimed he was innocent. Let’s just say it again, Louise-he was a witness, a suspect, and a convicted felon.