One Good Turn

3

Gloria hadn’t really seen what had happened. By the time the rumor of it had rippled down the spine of the queue, she suspected it had become a Chinese whisper. Someone had been murdered. “Queue jumping, probably,” she said matter-of-factly to a twittery Pam standing next to her. Gloria was stoical in queues, irritated by people who complained and shuffled as if their impatience were in some way a mark of their individuality. Queuing was like life: you just shut up and got on with it. It seemed a shame she had been born just too late for the Second World War, she possessed exactly the kind of long-suffering spirit that wartime relied on. Stoicism was, in Gloria’s opinion, a very underrated virtue in the modern world.

She could understand why someone might want to kill a queue jumper. If it had been up to her she would have summarily executed a great many people by now-people who dropped litter in the street, for example, they would certainly think twice about the discarded sweet wrapper if it resulted in being strung up from the nearest lamppost. Gloria used to be opposed to capital punishment, she remembered, during her too-brief time at university, demonstrating against an execution in some faraway country that she couldn’t have placed on the map, but now her feelings tended to run in quite the opposite direction.

Gloria liked rules, rules were Good Things. Gloria liked rules that said you couldn’t speed or park on double-yellow lines, rules that told you not to drop litter or deface buildings. She was sick and tired of hearing people complain about speed cameras and parking wardens as if there were some reason that they should be exempt from them. When she was younger she used to fantasize about sex and love, about keeping chickens and bees, being taller, running through fields with a black-and-white border collie. Now she daydreamed about being the keeper at the gates, of standing with the ultimate ledger and ticking off the names of the dead as they appeared before her, giving them the nod through or the thumbs-down. All those people who parked in bus bays and ran the red light on pedestrian crossings were going to be very sorry when Gloria peered at them over the top of her spectacles and asked them to account for themselves.

Pam wasn’t what Gloria would have called a friend, just someone she had known for so long that she had given up trying to get rid of her. Pam was married to Murdo Miller, Gloria’s own husband’s closest friend. Graham and Murdo had attended the same Edinburgh school, an expensive education that had put a civil polish on their basically loutish characters. They were now both much richer than their fellow alumni, a fact which Murdo said “just goes to show.” Gloria thought that it didn’t go to show anything except, possibly, that they were greedier and more ruthless than their former classmates. Graham was the son of a builder (Hatter Homes) and had started his career carrying hods of bricks on one of his father’s small building sites. Now he was a multi-millionaire property developer. Murdo was the son of a man who owned a small security firm (Haven Security) and had started off as a bouncer at a pub door. Now he ran a huge security operation-clubs, pubs, football matches, concerts. Graham and Murdo had many business interests in common, concerns that spread everywhere and had little to do with building or security and required meetings in Jersey, the Caymans, the Virgin Islands. Graham had his fingers in so many pies that he had run out of fingers long ago. “Business begets business,” he explained to Gloria. “Money makes money.” The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Both Graham and Murdo lived with the trappings of respectability-houses that were too big for them, cars that they exchanged each year for a newer model, wives that they didn’t. They wore blindingly white shirts and handmade shoes, they had bad livers and untroubled consciences, but beneath their aging hides they were barbarians.

“Did I tell you we’ve had the downstairs cloakroom done out?” Pam asked. “Hand stenciling. I wasn’t sure to begin with but I’m coming round to it now.”

“Mm,” Gloria said. “Fascinating.”

It was Pam who had wanted to come to this lunchtime radio recording (Edinburgh Fringe Comedy Showcase), and Gloria had tagged along in the hope that at least one of the comics might be funny, although her expectations were not high. Unlike some Edinburgh residents who regarded the advent of the annual Festival as something akin to the arrival of the Black Death, Gloria quite enjoyed the atmosphere and liked to attend the odd play or a concert at the Queen’s Hall. Comedy, she wasn’t so sure about.

“How’s Graham?” Pam asked.

“Oh, you know,” Gloria said. “He’s Graham.” That was the truth of it, Graham was Graham, there was nothing more, nor less, that Gloria could say about her husband.

“There’s a police car,” Pam said, standing on tiptoe to get a better look. “I can see a man on the ground. He looks dead.” She sounded thrilled.

Gloria had fallen to dwelling a lot on death recently. Her elder sister had died at the beginning of the year, and then a few weeks ago she had received a postcard from an old school friend, informing her that one of their group had recently succumbed to cancer. The message “Jill passed last week. The first of us to go!” seemed unnecessarily jaunty. Gloria was fifty-nine and wondered who would be the last to go and whether it was a competition.

“Policewomen,” Pam trilled happily.

An ambulance nosed its way cautiously through the crowd. The queue had shuffled on considerably so now they could see the police car. One of the policewomen shouted at the crowd not to go into the venue but to stay where they were because the police would be collecting statements from them about the “incident.” Undeterred, the crowd continued to move in a slow stream into the venue.

Gloria had been brought up in a northern town. Larry, her father, a morose yet earnest man, sold insurance door-to-door to people who could barely afford it. Gloria didn’t think people did that anymore. Her past already seemed an antiquated curiosity-a virtual space recreated by the museum of the future. When he was at home and not lugging his ancient briefcase from one unfriendly doorstep to another, her father had spent his time slumped in front of the fire, devouring detective novels and sipping conservatively from a half-pint glass mug of beer. Her mother, Thelma, worked part-time in a local chemist’s shop. For work, she wore a knee-length white coat, the medical nature of which she offset with a large pair of pearl-and-gilt earrings. She claimed that working in a chemist made her privy to everyone’s intimate secrets, but as far as the young Gloria could tell she spent her time selling insoles and cotton wool, and the most excitement she derived from the job was arranging the Christmas window with tinsel and Yardley gift boxes.

Gloria’s parents led drab, listless lives that the wearing of pearl-and-gilt earrings and the reading of detective novels did little to enliven. Gloria presumed her life would be quite different-that glorious things would happen to her (as her name implied), that she would be illuminated within and without and her path would scorch like a comet’s. This did not happen!

Beryl and Jock, Graham’s parents, were not that different from Gloria’s own parents, they had more money and were further up the social ladder, but they had the same basic low expectations of life. They lived in a pleasant “Edinburgh bungalow” in Corstorphine, and Jock owned a relatively modest building firm from which he had made a decent living. Graham himself had done a year of civil engineering at Napier (“waste of fucking time”) before joining his father in the business. Within a decade he was in the boardroom of his own large empire, HATTER HOMES-REAL HOMES FOR REAL PEOPLE. Gloria had thought that slogan up many years ago and now really wished that she hadn’t.

Graham and Gloria had married in Edinburgh rather than in Gloria’s hometown (Gloria had come to Edinburgh as a student), and her parents traveled up on a Cheap Day Return and were away again as soon as the cake was cut. The cake was Graham’s mother’s Christmas cake, hastily converted for the wedding. Beryl always made her cake in September and left it swaddled in white cloths in the larder to mature, tenderly unwrapping it every week and adding a baptismal slug of brandy. By the time Christmas came around, the white cloths were stained the color of mahogany. Beryl fretted over the cake for the wedding, as it was still far from its nativity (they were married at the end of October), but she put on a stalwart face and decked it out in marzipan and royal icing as usual. In place of the centerpiece snowman, a plastic bridal couple was caught in the act of an unconvincing waltz. Everyone presumed Gloria was pregnant (she wasn’t), as if that would be the only reason Graham would have married her.

Perhaps their decision to marry in a register office had thrown the parents off balance, “But it’s not as if we’re Christians, Gloria,” Graham had said, which was true. Graham was an aggressive atheist, and Gloria-born one-quarter Leeds Jewish and one-quarter Irish Catholic, and raised a West Yorkshire Baptist-was a passive agnostic, although, for want of anything better, “Church of Scotland” was what she had put on her hospital admission form when she had to have a bunion removed two years ago, privately at the Murrayfield. If she imagined God at all, it was as a vague entity that hung around behind her left shoulder, rather like a nagging parrot.

Long ago, Gloria was sitting on a bar stool in a pub on the George IV Bridge in Edinburgh, wearing (unbelievable though it now seemed) a daringly short miniskirt, self-consciously smoking an Embassy and drinking a gin-and-orange and hoping she looked pretty while around her raged a heated student conversation about Marxism. Tim, her boyfriend at the time-a gangly youth with a white boy’s Afro before Afros of any kind were fashionable-was one of the most vociferous of the group, waving his hands around every time he said “exchange of commodities” or “the rate of surplus value” while Gloria sipped her gin-and-orange and nodded sagely, hoping that no one would expect her to contribute because she hadn’t the faintest idea what they were talking about. She was in the second year of her degree, studying history but in a lackadaisical kind of manner that ignored the political (the Declaration of Arbroath and Tennis-Court Oaths) in favor of the romantic (Rob Roy, Marie Antoinette) and that didn’t endear her to the teaching staff.

She couldn’t remember Tim’s surname now, all she could remember about him was his great cloud of hair, like a dandelion clock. Tim declared to the group that they were all working class now. Gloria frowned because she didn’t want to be working class, but everyone around her was murmuring in agreement-although there wasn’t one of them who wasn’t the offspring of a doctor or a lawyer or a businessman-when a loud voice announced, “That’s shite. You’d be nothing without capitalism. Capitalism has saved mankind.”And that was Graham.

He was wearing a sheepskin coat, a secondhand-car salesman’s kind of coat, and drinking a pint on his own in a corner of the bar. He had seemed like a man, but he hadn’t even reached his twenty-fifth birthday, which Gloria could see now was nothing.

And then he downed his beer and turned to her and said, “Are you coming?” and she’d slipped off her bar stool and followed him like a little dog because he was so forceful and attractive compared to someone with dandelion-clock hair.

And now it was all coming to an end. Yesterday the Specialist Fraud Unit had made an unexpected but polite appearance at Hatter Homes’ headquarters on Queensferry Road, and now Graham feared that they were about to throw a light into every murky corner of his business dealings. He had arrived home late, the worse for wear, downed a double of Macallan without even tasting it, and then slumped on the sofa, staring at the television like a blind man. Gloria fried for him a lamb chop with leftover potatoes and said, “Did they find your secret books, then?” and he laughed grimly and said, “They’ll never find my secrets, Gloria,” but for the first time in the thirty-nine years Gloria had known him, he didn’t sound cocky. They were coming for him, and he knew it.

It was the field that had done it for him. He had bought a greenbelt site that had no planning permission attached to it, he had got the land cheaply-land without planning permission is just a field, after all-but then, hey presto, six months later the planning permission was granted and now a hideous estate of two-, three-, and four-bedroom “family homes” was under construction on the northeastern outskirts of town.

A tidy little sum to someone in the planning department was all it had taken, the kind of transaction Graham had done a hundred times before, “greasing the wheels,” he called it. For Graham it had been a little thing, his corruption was so much wider and deeper and far-reaching than a green field on the edge of town. But it was the littlest things that often brought big men down.

Once the ambulance containing the Peugeot driver had disappeared, the policewomen started to take statements from the crowd. “Hopefully we’ll get something on the CCTV,” one of them said, indicating a camera that Gloria hadn’t noticed, high up on a wall. Gloria liked the idea that there were cameras watching everyone everywhere. Last year Graham had installed a new state-of-the-art security system in the house-cameras and infrared sensors and panic buttons and goodness knows what else. Gloria was fond of the helpful little robots that patrolled her garden with their spying eyes. Once, the eye of God watched people, now it was the camera lens.

“There was a dog,” Pam said, fluffing her apricot-tinted hair self-consciously.

“Everyone remembers the dog,” the policewoman sighed. “I have several very accurate descriptions of the dog, but the Honda driver is variously described as ‘dark, fair, tall, short, skinny, fat, midtwenties, fiftyish.’ No one even took down his car’s registration number. You would think someone would have managed that.”

“You would,” Gloria agreed. “You would think that.”

They were too late now for the BBC radio showcase. Pam was delighted that they had been entertained by drama rather than comedy.

“And I’ve got the Book Festival on Thursday,” she said. “You’re sure you don’t want to come?” Pam was a fan of some crime writer who was reading at the Book Festival. Gloria had no enthusiasm for crime writing, it had sucked the life out of her father, and anyway wasn’t there enough crime in the world without adding to it, even if it was only fictional?

“It’s just a bit of escapism,” Pam said defensively.

If you needed to escape, in Gloria’s opinion, then you just got in a car and drove away. Gloria’s favorite novel still resolutely remained Anne of Green Gables, which, when she was young, had represented a mode of being that, although ideal, hadn’t yet become impossible.

“We could go for a nice cup of tea somewhere,” Pam said, but Gloria excused herself, saying, “Things to do at home,” and Pam said, “What things?”

“Just things,” Gloria said. She was in an eBay auction for a pair of Staffordshire greyhounds that closed in two hours and she wanted to be in there at the finish.

“My, but you’re a woman of secrets, Gloria.”

“No, I’m not,” Gloria said.