One Good Turn

27

Louise stared through the windshield at the rain. This could be a godforsaken country when it rained. Godforsaken when it didn’t.

The car was parked down by the harbor at Cramond, looking out toward the island. There were three of them in the car, her-self, DS Sandy Mathieson, and eager-beaver Jessica Drummond. They had steamed up the inside of the car like lovers or conspir-ators, although they were doing nothing more exciting than talking about house prices. “Where two or more people are gathered together in Edinburgh,” Louise said.

“Supply and demand, boss,” Sandy Mathieson said. “It’s a town with more demand than supply.” Louise would have preferred “ma’am” to “boss,” “ma’am” made her sound like a woman (somewhere between an aristocrat and a headmistress, both ideas quite appealing), whereas “boss” made her one of the boys. But then, didn’t you have to be one of the boys to cut it? “I read in the Evening News,” Sandy Mathieson continued, “that there aren’t enough expensive houses in Edinburgh. There are millionaires fighting over the high-end stuff.”

“The Russians are moving in, apparently,” Jessica said.

“The Russians?” Louise asked. “What Russians?”

“Rich ones.”

“The Russians are the new Americans, apparently,” Sandy Mathieson said.

“Someone paid a hundred thousand for a garage last week,” Jessica complained. “How insane is that? I can’t even afford a starter home in Gorgie.”

“It was a double garage,” Sandy Mathieson said. Louise laughed and cracked a window to let out some of the hot air. The tide was dropping, and she caught a faint smell of sewage in the damp air. She never knew whether or not Sandy Mathieson was being funny. “Not” seemed more likely, he never seemed sharp enough to be witty. He was true to his name, from his gingery hair to his little beard to his giraffe-colored freckles. He made Louise think of a biscuit, shortbread or gingerbread, perhaps a digestive. He was a straight-down-the-middle type, married, two children, docile dog, season ticket to Hearts, barbecues with the in-laws on the weekends. He had told her once that he had everything he had ever wanted and would die protecting any of it, even the season ticket to Hearts.

“That must be nice,” Louise had said, not really meaning it. She wasn’t the sacrificing kind. Archie was the only thing she would die for.

“Where do you live, boss?” Jessica asked.

“Glencrest,” Louise said reluctantly, she had no desire to start chatting about her private life with Jessica. She knew the type from her school days, winkling out intimacies and then using them against her. “Louise Monroe’s mother’s an alkie, Louise Monroe gets free school meals, Louise Monroe is a liar.”

“That Hatter Homes development out by the Braids?” Sandy Mathieson said. “We looked at that. Too pricey, we decided.”The “we” sounded emphasized, Louise noticed, underlining his little world. “Me and my wife and my two children and my docile dog.” Not a woman on her own with a kid whose paternity had always been a matter for speculation. Sandy was a plodder, too unimaginative to be unfaithful to his wife, too stolid to rise above the rank he was at now. But he would always do the right thing by his kids, and he didn’t dodge and weave with the truth, didn’t seed favors- a blind eye here, a deaf ear there. Wouldn’t screw a DI in the back of a police car, too drunk to remember that sex was a biological imperative with only one goal. (“I’m pulling rank on you, Louise.” Hilarious, how they’d laughed. Jesus.)

“It’s a very small house,” Louise said defensively.

“Still…” Sandy said, as if he’d proved some point about Louise’s untold riches.

“Didn’t there turn out to be some problems with Glencrest?” Jessica asked.

“Problems?” Louise said.

“Subsidence or something.”

“What?”

“Real Homes for Real People,” Jessica said. “Word on the pave-ment is that Graham Hatter’s going down.”

“‘Going down’? You sound like an extra off The Bill.”Yes, that would be Jessica, Louise could just see her going home at night, putting her clumpy feet up, eating a takeaway in front of The Bill. “ ‘Going down’ for what?”

“Well, a little bird says they’re after him for money laundering, among other things. But apparently it’s huge, corruption in high places and all that.”

“A little bird?” Louise said.

“I have a friend in fraud.”

“Really? You have a friend?”

“Name me a famous woman who drowned,” Louise said. Jessica gave her a worried look, as if she suspected this were part of some kind of intellectual hazing, some arcane knowledge that you needed in order to be in plain clothes. Her pudgy brow puckered with the effort of remembering something she didn’t know in the first place.

“You see?” Louise said when no answer was forthcoming. “Women aren’t known for drowning.”

“I think I prefer I-Spy,” Sandy Mathieson said.

All morning while Louise had been in court, her small “flu-diminished” team had been busy, mostly on door-to-door inquiries. Had anyone seen anything unusual, had anyone seen a woman go into the water, had anyone seen a woman onshore, had anyone seen a woman, had anyone seen anything? A negative on all counts. The divers had come up with nothing. Louise had watched them emerging from the water-“frogmen,” they used to be called, you didn’t hear that word used much anymore.They reminded her of The Man from Atlantis.

They were chasing a wild goose, a trick of light on water.

“I see dead people,” Jessica intoned.

The only excitement in Cramond over the last few days had been an unattended car alarm and a dog that had been run over. The dog was making a good recovery, apparently. Fantastically low crime rate-that’s what you got for paying a small fortune to live in one of the nicest parts of Edinburgh.

She had shown her team the pink card that she’d taken from the mortuary, didn’t mention how she’d come by it, told them to ask around to see if anyone had heard of Favors, but it seemed the good burghers of Cramond didn’t move in the kind of society where girls handed out little pink cards with phone numbers on them.

Louise had sent a couple of uniforms on a trawl of the cheap jewelry shops in town for gold earrings in the shape of a cross. “I can’t believe how much nine-carat crap there is out there,” one of them had reported back. More crucifix earrings than you might have thought, it turned out, but no one remembered a five foot six, hundred-twenty-pound blonde buying a pair.

The Girl with the Crucifix Earring, like a lost painting of Vermeer. Louise had seen Girl with a Pearl Earring at the Filmhouse, in the company of friends, two other single women. It was a film meant for single women of a certain age-muted, poignant, full of art, ultimately depressing. It had (briefly) made her want to live in seventeenth-century Holland. When she was young, she had often fantasized about living in the past, mainly because the present had been so awful.

“Who’s on the Merchiston murder?” she asked.

“Robert Campbell, Colin Sutherland,” Jessica said promptly. “High-profile celebrity murder gets the big fish high up the food chain.”

“Celebrity?”

“Richard Mott,” Sandy Mathieson said dismissively, “eighties comedian. Did you hear what happened?”

“No, what?” Louise said. The name sounded vaguely familiar.

“They ID’d the wrong person,” Jessica said.

“You’re kidding.”

Sandy laughed. “Apparently he lived with this other guy, a writer, wasn’t it?” He checked with Jessica (Christ, they were like a double-act), who nodded and took up the story. “And he was wearing his boyfriend’s watch,” she said.

“Who was?” Louise was totally confused.

“Richard Mott,” Jessica said with theatrical patience, “was wearing the other guy’s watch. His boyfriend. And the boyfriend- get this-is a crime writer.”

“Life imitating art,” Sandy said as if he’d just invented the phrase. “Alex Blake. Ever heard of him?”

“No,” Louise said. “They ID’d him by his watch?”

“Well, his face was gone, apparently,” Jessica said in the offhand way you might say, “Do you want vinegar on your chips?” Louise could have eaten a horse, she’d had nothing since breakfast. “Have you got anything to eat?” she said to Jessica.

“Sorry, boss.” Cheeky cow. Louise didn’t believe her, you didn’t get that fat without having constant access to food. Louise supposed she should have warm and fuzzy feelings toward the sisterhood, they were only 25 percent of the force, they should support one another, yada, yada, but quite honestly she’d like to corner Jessica and give her a few vicious playground pinches.

There was a constant undertow of communication on the po-lice radio. A lot of shoplifting. What would happen if Archie’s foray into thieving hadn’t been a one-off? What would she do if he was caught next time? Louise checked her watch, he should be home from school by now.

Sandy turned to her and asked unexpectedly, parent to parent, “How’s that lad of yours doing?”

“Fine,” Louise said. “Archie’s doing fine. Great,” she added, trying to introduce a more upbeat note, “he’s doing great.” Sandy had a boy, but he was only six or seven years old, still harmless.

She climbed out of the car, waving her mobile at Sandy and Jessica in a shorthand that said only too plainly, “I’m going to make a call that I don’t want you to hear.” She wondered what they said about her when she wasn’t there. She didn’t really care as long as they thought she was good at her job.

She walked out onto the causeway, only one bar of signal on her phone. Jackson Brodie said he couldn’t get a signal at all, that was why he hadn’t phoned the police from the island.

She walked back and caught a signal. Her answering machine clicked in after a couple of rings, and she listened to an assertive male voice informing her that no one was available to answer the phone just now, so “leave a message.” Nice and neutral, no “please” or “thank-you” (I’m a polite woman asking to be offended), no “sorry, there’s no one at home” (open invitation to burglars), no promise that anyone would actually return the call. The male voice belonged to a friend’s husband, drafted in to record the message after Louise had been plagued by nuisance calls, even though she was unlisted. Some guys just dialed every number until a woman answered. There were thousands of them out there, seeing out the wee small hours by dialing the Samari-tans and ChildLine and unsuspecting women. Wankers, in every sense of the word. She had an uncomfortable feeling that the per-petrator of the nuisance calls was Archie’s friend Hamish.

“If you’re there, Archie, can you pick up?” When hell froze over. Louise didn’t know why she was bothering, he never an-swered the phone unless he thought it was one of his friends. She tried his mobile, but it went straight to his answering machine. If she could, she would have a tracking device implanted in his scruff.

Finally she gave in and, using the only lingua franca understood by fourteen-year-old boys, texted him, “Are u home? Eat something from the freezer. I may be late. Love Mum x.” It was odd to give her-self that appellation, to commit it to writing, she never thought of herself as “Mum.” Maybe that was where she’d gone wrong. Had she gone wrong? Probably.

Archie could just about manage to take a pizza or a burger from the freezer and put it in the microwave.There was no point in trying to get him to do anything more challenging (“An omelet, surely you can manage an omelet?”).

Her phone rang, not Archie but Jim Tucker. “My girl died of a heroin overdose,” he said without preamble. “No identity yet. The forensic dentist said her mouth was, and I quote, ‘full of crap,’ by which he meant foreign fillings, Eastern European, by the look of it.”

“No dental records, then,” Louise said.

“No, and I don’t know if it’s likely, but someone said that they thought Favors were cleaners.”

“Cleaners?”

As soon as she’d said good-bye to Jim Tucker, her phone rang again. “I’ve been trying to phone you,”Archie complained.

“I try to phone you all the time and you never answer.”

“Can Hamish stay over tonight?”

“It’s a school night.”

“We’ve got a geography project we have to do together.”

“What project?”A short, muffled conversation ensued, Hamish tutoring Archie, no doubt, before he came back on the line and said smugly, “Discuss the transport factors influencing the location of industry.”

It was plausible, Hamish was good. “Does his mother say he can?”

“Of course.”

“Okay.”

“And can we get a takeaway?”

“Okay. Do you have money?”

“Yes.”

“Will you remember to feed the cat?”

“Whatever.”

“That’s not the answer I’m looking for.”

“Yessss. Okay? Jesus.”

Louise sighed, she really, really wanted a drink. A lime daiquiri. Cold enough to freeze her brain. And then she’d like to have a lot of sex. Casual, mindless, faceless, emotion-free sex. You would think casual sex would be easy, but no. She’d hardly had any since Archie hit adolescence. You couldn’t just bring a guy home and shag him while your teenage son was playing Grand Theft Auto on the other side of a wafer-thin plasterboard wall. Every year there was a fresh surprise, something you didn’t know about having a kid. Maybe it went on like that forever, maybe when Archie was sixty and Louise was in her eighties, she’d be thinking, “Well, I didn’t realize sixty-year-old men did that.”

She watched a uniformed PC tap on Jessica’s window and hand her something.

“What did the UB want?” she asked, climbing back in the car.

“Brought this,” Jessica said, handing her a copy of the Evening News, helpfully turned to an inside page where she pointed out the small headline POLICE ASK PUBLIC FOR HELP WITH THEIR INQUIRIES.

“It’s not very obvious, is it?” Sandy said. “‘Police are asking if any-one saw a woman go into the water’-‘go into the water’? That’s very vague.”

“Well, it is very vague,” Louise said. “She was found in the water and somehow or other she got into it.”

“If she exists,” Jessica said. She sneezed, and Sandy said, “Hope you’re not getting the ‘flu.’ ” Louise didn’t care if Jessica got the “flu.”

Louise felt suddenly incredibly tired. “Bugger this for a game of soldiers. They’re putting out something on Radio Forth tomorrow, but in reality that’s it for now. If there’s a body out there, then it’ll probably wash up eventually. I don’t see what more we can do.”

“I don’t think there ever was a body,” Jessica said. “I think Brodie made the whole thing up. I know where the nut is and it’s not on the tree.”

“I didn’t like the guy,” Sandy said with the certainty of one who thinks his own moral judgment is unimpeachable. “I’m all for calling it a day.” He turned to Jessica and said, “Home, James.”