One Good Turn

33

Louise dialed his number from her car and, before he even had time to say anything, asked, “What were you like when you were fourteen?”

“Fourteen?”

“Yes, fourteen,”she repeated. The sound of his voice was a kick. He was just the right side of wrong.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “I was no altar boy, certainly. A bit of a tearaway, I suppose, like a lot of lads at that age.”

“I know absolutely nothing about fourteen-year-old boys.”

“Well, why should you?”

“My son’s fourteen.”

“Your son?” He sounded astonished. “I didn’t realize you were…”

“A mother?” she supplied. “I know it’s hard to believe, but there you go, it’s the old story-sperm meets egg and bam. It can happen to the best of us.” She sighed. “Fourteen-year-olds are a nightmare.” She realized that she was clutching the steering wheel of the car as if she were in rigor mortis.

“What’s his name?”

“Archie.” What’s his name? That was a question a parent would ask, Louise thought. When Archie was born, the people who asked, “How much does he weigh?” all had babies themselves.

Guys who weren’t fathers hadn’t been interested in Archie’s weight or what she was going to call him. So, she deduced, Jackson Brodie had kids. She didn’t want to know about that, wasn’t interested in secondhand guys with baggage. Kids were baggage, stuff you lugged around. Luggage.

“You have kids?” she asked. Just couldn’t help herself.

“Just one, a girl,” Jackson said. “Marlee. She’s ten. I know nothing about ten-year-old girls if it’s any consolation.”

“Archie’s not a criminal,” Louise said as if Jackson had accused him of something. “He’s basically harmless.”

“I nearly landed in court for stealing when I was fifteen if it’s any help.”

“What happened?”

“I joined the army.”

Jeez. Archie in the army, there’s a thought.

“This is why you’re calling?” he asked. “For advice about parenting?”

“No. I’m calling to tell you that I’m on a housing estate in Bur-diehouse.”

“Great name for a housing estate.” He sounded weary.

“I’m outside a shop that’s been boarded up. I think it used to be a post office. There’s a fish-and-chip shop on one side, a Scot-mid on the other side. Single story, commercial properties, no flats above, nothing remotely residential.”

“Why are you telling me this and should you be there in the dark on your own?”

“That’s very gallant of you, but I’m a big girl. I’m telling you because I thought you’d like to know that this is the address that Terence Smith gave to the court this morning.”

“Honda Man gave a false address?”

“Which is an offense. As you know. I told you that you were an idiot to plead guilty. And by the way, no one else caught the reg-istration of the car involved in the road-rage incident, so you held up the investigation by withholding vital information.”

“So sue me,” Jackson said. “I’ve just seen him, actually, he was trying to kill someone else.”

“Terence Smith?” she said sharply. “Please tell me you didn’t have another go at him?”

“No, although the police were keen to question me.”

“Jesus, what is it with you?”

“Trouble is my friend.”

“He was trying to kill someone? Is that one of your fantasies?”

“I don’t have fantasies. Not about people killing each other, anyway. If I tell you what happened, you’ll think I’m even more paranoid and delusional than you do already.”

“Try me,” she said.

“I saw a girl who looked like my dead girl, she even had the earrings.”

“You’re even more paranoid and delusional than I thought.”

“Told you.”

“You see dead girls everywhere.”

“No, I see the same dead girl everywhere.”

He was officially a lunatic, she decided. Strangely, that didn’t make him less attractive. She sighed and said, “Anyway, cheers. I’m off home. Sleep well.”

There were rules. The rules said, you don’t fool around with wit-nesses, you don’t fool around with suspects, you don’t fool around with convicted felons. And Jackson Brodie managed to be all three at once. Yes, Louise, you surely know how to pick them. And, of course, you don’t fool around with a man who already has a woman.

At least that explained why he was in Edinburgh. “For the Festival,” he had said when she first interviewed him, but he hadn’t seemed like the Festival type. Still didn’t. But Julia was in a play.

“What’s Julia like?”The naming of her had provoked an unexpected, visceral spasm of jealousy in Louise. Hold your tongue, bite your lip.

“She’s an actress.”That had surprised her. He frowned when he said her name.

Be honest. Honest was hard sometimes, even with herself. She was a natural dissembler. Even the word “dissembling” was a way of dissembling, of not just saying liar. Be honest, Louise, you fancy Jackson. Such an inane, adolescent word, “fancy.” LOUISE MONROE FANCIES GRANT NIVEN written in the school toilets in fourth year. PC Louise Monroe and DI Michael Pirie in the back of an un-marked squad car in the wee small hours of his leaving “do.” “Christ, I’ve always fancied you rotten, Louise.” The dull gleam of his wedding ring in the dark, the push and shove of unbridled lechery that kick-started Archie. How odd that babies, the absolute inno-cents at the top of the moral heap, were created out of such vul-garity. The beast with two backs. Maybe it wasn’t that she fancied Jackson exactly, maybe she just saw in him someone who had weathered the world and still had something left to give. “You can’t have it both ways,” one of her girlfriends said. “Tough and tender, men are like steaks, it’s one or the other.”Tough and tender, a con-tradiction in terms, Hegelian synthesis. Dualism, the Edinburgh disease. It was possible, Louise was sure, but perhaps only in a far-flung corner of the galaxy. Or with Jackson Brodie. Maybe.

She had noticed a chicken-pox scar beneath his eyebrow. Archie had one in almost the same place, a tiny shield-shaped depression in the skin that she supposed would last forever.

His dark hair was flecked with slate. At least he hadn’t done the middle-aged male thing of growing a beard to hide a double chin, not that he had a double chin. He probably wouldn’t look too bad with a beard. When she was younger she could never have imag-ined that she would find middle-aged men with graying hair or beards even remotely attractive. It just went to show. But let’s not forget Julia. Still, she was an actress and he frowned when he men-tioned her name. Two strikes against Julia.

It was odd how you could feel so attracted to someone by the simplest things, the way they handed you a drink and said, “There you go.” The dent of a chicken-pox scar, the cast of despair on their features when they said “Julia.”

Louise slipped her car into the garage. She remembered Sandy Mathieson saying that a garage had just sold for a hundred thou-sand. The thing about Edinburgh was that even some of the best addresses in town didn’t have garages, leaving the rich nobs stuck with the horrors of on-street parking, whereas Louise, in her modern, characterless (but still mind-blowingly expensive) estate house, had a double garage. Thank you, Graham Hatter. The urn that contained her mother was now sitting on a shelf in the garage, between a half-empty two-liter can of paint and a jar of nails. She gave the urn a mock salute as she got out of the car. “Hey, Mom.”

Jellybean was waiting behind the front door to greet her. A deep thumping bass pulsated out of Archie’s bedroom. Jellybean followed her up the stairs, he had to put all four paws on a step before he could move on up to the next, it wasn’t long since he’d been like quicksilver on the stairs. The corkscrew in her heart moved a quarter turn.

“I was a bit of a tearaway, I suppose.” “Tearaway” was a good word, she could use that next time Archie got into trouble. “Archie’s a bit of a tearaway, but he’s okay.” More and more she had this troubling vi-sion of sitting in a courtroom, watching Archie in the dock, seeing his whole life go down the pan, and her life with it. “You placed him in a nursery when he was three months old and went back to work, Ms. Monroe? You have always put your career first, haven’t you? You don’t know who his father is?” Of course she knew, she just wasn’t going to say. Harmless, my ass, she thought. He was a little shit, that’s what he was.

She knocked on the door of Archie’s room and went in quickly, without waiting for an answer. Always try and catch suspects off guard. Archie and Hamish (damn, she’d forgotten about Hamish) were huddled around Archie’s computer. She heard Hamish’s sotto voce warning, “Incoming, Arch.”Archie turned off the computer screen as she came in the room. Porn, probably. She turned the music off. She shouldn’t do that, really. He had rights after all. No, he didn’t.

“Okay, boys?” she said. She could hear herself sounding like an officer of the law, not a mother.

“We’re fine, Louise,” said Hamish, giving her a big, cheesy grin. Fucking little Harry Potter. Archie said nothing, just glared at her, waiting for her to leave. If she’d had a girl they would be having little chats now, about clothes, boys, school. A girl would lie on her bed and look through her makeup, she would share her secrets, hopes, dreams, all the things Louise had never done with her own mother.

“You’ve got school tomorrow, you should be asleep.”

“You’re so right, Louise,” Hamish said. “Come on, Archie, time to go bye-byes.”

Little fucker, she thought as she left the room. She walked away and then tiptoed back to listen at the door. The music remained off, and they seemed to be reading from a book, first one voice, then the other. Not porn, anyway, although they were both sniggering as if it were. Hamish’s confident tones, more masculine when incorporeal, declared, “‘You know,I think there’s more to this than meets the eye,Bertie,’ Nina said.‘Maud Elphinstone seems whiter than the proverbial driven snow, but methinks the lady doth protest too much.’” And Archie’s swooping, cracked voice said, “‘Why, Bertie, I do believe you’re blushing.’”

Were they gay? How would she feel if her son was gay? Actually it would be quite a relief, she wouldn’t have to deal with any of that macho bullshit in the future. Someone to go shopping with, that’s what they (mothers of gay sons) always said, didn’t they? She didn’t like shopping, so that might be a bit of a problem.

“‘I do believe you have a pash on the lovely Maud, Bertie.’”

For a moment, when they were saying good-bye, she thought Jackson was going to kiss her. What would she have done? Kissed him back, right there in the middle of the street, like a teenager. Louise Monroe has a pash on Jackson Brodie. Because Louise Monroe was an idiot, obviously.