One Good Turn

42

Jackson worked hard at suppressing a yawn. The Spiegeltent was thick with overheated air. “Deconstructed romantic irony,” said the ca-daverous woman who had introduced the writers on the platform, her words seemingly addressed to no one in particular. Jackson had no idea what she meant. She was wearing a low-cut top that revealed a bony sternum and breasts that hung like flaps. Someone give that woman a good meal, Jackson thought. Retaining an impassive expression on his face, he conjured up a picture of Julia’s breasts, breasts he hadn’t seen enough of recently. Louise Monroe had much smaller breasts, you didn’t have to see her naked to know that. But she had them, there was no doubt about that. He mustn’t think about Louise Monroe naked. He felt a stab of cuckold’s guilt. Very, very bad dog.

And, he noticed, here were yet more people who didn’t seem to have jobs to go to, how did the economy of the country not collapse? Who was actually working? The foreign and the dispossessed-girls named Marijut and Sophia. And computer geeks, thousands of spotty boys who never saw daylight, the suits in the financial district, a few orange sellers, and that was it. And the emergency services, of course, they never rested. He wondered how Julia’s day was going. He checked his watch discreetly. Per-haps she was having lunch with someone. Acting wasn’t real work, not by anyone’s definition of the word.

Martin, who clearly should be lying down in a darkened room listening to soothing music, seemed hysterically insistent that he appear at the Book Festival today even though it seemed an un-necessary kind of engagement to Jackson. He already had to have a quiet word with a journalist who wanted to interview Martin. “Sub judice,” Jackson said to the man, rather more menacingly than he’d intended. He really wasn’t in the mood today to be messed around with.

A lot seemed to have happened to Martin since Tuesday. A lot had happened to Jackson as well, of course, but Martin was winning hands down in the having-a-bad-day stakes.

“My laptop disappeared after I threw it at the Honda driver,” he said breathlessly when Jackson caught up with him at the Book Festival in Charlotte Square. He seemed slightly deranged. Of course, there was deranged and then there was deranged, Jackson wasn’t sure he was up to the second kind, but Martin seemed lucid and articulate. Perhaps a little too articulate for Jackson’s liking.

“I spent the night in a hotel with the Peugeot driver because the hospital was worried that he might be concussed. His name was Paul Bradley, only it turns out that it wasn’t, because there’s no such person. He doesn’t exist. But of course he exists, you saw him, didn’t you? He had a gun. It was a Welrod. But then I passed out because I think he drugged me and then he stole my wallet. I wouldn’t mind, but I saved his life.”

“A Welrod?” Jackson queried. How did Martin know about guns? About Welrods, for heaven’s sake.

“And someone broke into my office, well not broke in, there was no sign of a break-in, but there was a sweet wrapper on the floor-”

“A sweet wrapper?”

“I don’t eat sweets! And now it turns out that Paul Bradley doesn’t even exist! And he was my alibi.”

“Alibi?”

“For murder.”

“Murder?” Jackson revised his opinion, maybe this was the second kind of deranged.

“A man was murdered in my house! Richard Mott, the come-dian, and then he phoned me.”

“Whoa. Richard Mott was murdered in your house?”

“Yes. And then he phoned me.”

“Yes, you said that.” Could Martin tell the difference between fact and fiction? He was a writer, after all.

“Not him, I know it wasn’t him. The murderer must have taken his phone-his phone was missing-and then he phoned me on it.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know!”

“Okay, okay, stay calm.” Jackson sighed. You said five little words to someone-How can I help you?-and it was as if you’d mort-gaged your soul out to them.

Despite the fact that everything Martin said sounded out-landish, there were little anchors of truth in his story. And who was Jackson to criticize, after all? He had tried to save a dead girl from drowning, he had killed a dog with the power of his thoughts. Jackson wondered if Martin still lived with his mother. Not that there was anything wrong with that, Jackson would quite like to be living with his own mother, his time with her having been cut so short. No, Martin didn’t live with his mother, he lived with Richard Mott, didn’t he?

“Not lived,” Martin corrected. “He was staying with me while he was up for the Festival. I hardly knew him, actually. I didn’t even like him. What if his killer is coming after me next?”

“I think you need to talk to the police, Martin.”

“No!”

“Give them your phone so they can try to trace the call.”

“No!”

They were a contentious bunch. He had never heard of Dougal Tarvit, nor E. M. Heller. He’d never heard of Alex Blake, come to that, until yesterday evening. On his way over to the Book Festi-val, he had popped into a bookshop and leafed through one of “Alex Blake’s” books in the coffee shop. It was innocuous stuff, depicting a kind of retro-utopian Britain that was rife with aristo-crats and gamekeepers-although no one seemed to have sex (which would fit with Martin’s neutered demeanor). It was a non-sensical kind of setting where murders were tidy affairs that resulted in inoffensive corpses, the stuff of Sunday-evening television, the equivalent of a hot bath and a warm mug of cocoa. The serfs weren’t revolting, they were positively happy in their chains, and the rank smell of death didn’t corrupt the genteel, heather-scented air around Nina Riley’s head. “‘Don’t go in there, Miss Riley,’ the gillie said,‘it’s no’ a sight for a bonny young lassie’s eyes.’”

Nina Riley had a sidekick. Didn’t they all? Robin to her Bat-man. “I’ve discovered something important, Bertie. I must see you.” There was a guy named Burt who used to be his brother Francis’s best friend. Both welders, both rugby players. Burt had broken down at Francis’s funeral-it was the only thing Jackson could remember about his brother’s funeral-Burt crying at the graveside, ugly masculine sobs, coughed up by a macho guy who probably hadn’t cried since he was a baby. Francis had killed himself, in a brutal, casual way that Jackson now recognized as being typical of his brother. “You stupid fucking bastard, Francis!” Burt had shouted angrily to the coffin as it was lowered, before a couple of guys wrestled him away from the open maw of the grave. Francis had never been “Frank” or “Fran,” he had always been called by his full name, it had lent him a certain dignity that he had possi-bly never really earned.

Jackson didn’t remember his sister’s funeral because he hadn’t attended it, staying with a neighbor instead. Mrs. Judd. It was a long time since he’d thought about Mrs. Judd, the sooty smell of her back parlor with its overstuffed cut moquette, the gold eyetooth that gave her a slightly rakish, gypsy air although there had been nothing unconventional in a life that had been defined by the pit-daughter of a miner, wife of a miner, mother of a miner.

Jackson was all dressed, ready to go to Niamh’s funeral, he could recall the black suit he was wearing, made from a cheap, felty ma-terial, he’d never seen it before and never saw it again, but when it came time to go, he simply couldn’t, shaking his head mutely when his father said, “Best get going, son.” Francis said gruffly, “Come on, Jackson, you’ll be sorry if you don’t come and say good-bye to her proper-like,” but Jackson had never regretted not going to that terrible funeral. Francis was right, though, he had never properly said good-bye to Niamh.

He was twelve years old and had never worn a suit before, and it would be years before he wore one again-Francis’s funeral hadn’t merited one, apparently-and all he remembered about that day was wearing someone else’s ill-fitting suit and sitting at Mrs. Judd’s little kitchen table with its worn Formica, dotted with cigarette burns, and drinking sweet tea and eating a Birds Eye chicken pie. Funny the things you remembered. “Bertie, this was no accident, this was murder!”

He had expected someone to come up to him in the coffee shop and ask him with a sarcastic sneer if he was intending to buy the book or just sit there all day and read it for free, but then he realized that no one cared and he could indeed have sat there all day, with a sickly latte and an even more sickly blueberry muffin, and read Alex Blake’s entire oeuvre without paying, if he so wished. Nobody worked and the books were free.

Jackson didn’t read much fiction, never had, just the occasional spy or thriller thing on holiday. He preferred factual books, they gave him the feeling that he was learning something, even if he forgot it almost immediately. He wasn’t really sure he saw the point of novels, he didn’t go around saying that, because then people thought you were a philistine. Maybe he was a philistine. Julia was a great reader, she always had a novel on the go, but then her whole professional life was based on fictions of one kind or another, whereas his whole professional life had been based on fact.

He wasn’t much better with art. All that fuzzy Impressionism didn’t do it for him, he’d looked at endless water lilies and thought, What’s the point? And religious paintings made him feel as if he were in a Catholic church. He liked representational art, pictures that told a story. He liked Vermeer, all those cool interi-ors spoke of an ordinariness he could relate to, a moment in time captured forever, because life wasn’t about legions of Madonnas and water lilies, it was about the commonplace of details-the woman pouring milk from a jug, the boy sitting at the kitchen table, eating a chicken pie.

You could tell Tarvit was an arrogant prick, and E. M. Heller (what kind of a name was that?) was just plain odd, she was either a badly put-together woman or she was a man in drag. Trans-vestism was a mystery to Jackson, he had never in his life worn a single item of female clothing, apart from once borrowing a cash-mere scarf from Julia when they were going for a walk and being troubled all afternoon by its perfumed softness around his neck. Martin seemed blithely unaware of the signals that E. M. Heller was sending his way. The guy definitely had a look of celibacy about him, he reminded Jackson of a vicar or a monk. E. M.- Eustacia Marguerite or Edward Malcolm? Whichever, E. M. was going to have her work cut out with Martin.

Jackson felt faintly ludicrous, standing like a Secret Service agent behind Martin in the “Signing Tent” (he had originally mis-read it as the “Singing Tent”-an idea that had both alarmed and confused him). The Book Festival was a jamboree of tents and reminded him vaguely of an army field camp. He had a sudden flashback to the smell of the big top last night, the familiar scent of grass under canvas. The crazy Russian girl like a bandit queen, with her knife at his throat.

Martin glanced up nervously as each new person approached him, as if he were waiting for an unknown assassin. Jackson didn’t understand why he was doing the event if he was so worried. “I’m not going to hide away,” Martin said. “You have to face the thing you’re afraid of.” In Jackson’s experience it was often best to avoid the thing you were afraid of. Discretion really was sometimes the better part of valor.

“But at the same time you’re worried that someone’s after you? The person who stole Richard Mott’s phone, the person who broke into your office?”

“No, that’s not who’s after me,” Martin said. “Cosmic justice is after me.”

“Cosmic justice?” Martin made it sound like a person, an out-rider for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

“I committed a crime,” Martin said. “And now I must be punished. An eye for an eye.”

Jackson tried to be encouraging. “Come on now, Martin, wasn’t it Gandhi who said, ‘An eye for an eye and the whole world will be blind’?”Something like that, anyway. He had seen it on a T-shirt once, at a CND demonstration he’d policed in the eighties. Last year Julia made him go on an antiwar march. That was how far his world had turned around.

“I’m sorry,” Martin said. “It’s very good of you to do this.”

Jackson didn’t mind, it had all the trappings of a job, and he was doing something rather than just hanging around (although it felt very like hanging around). Close-up and personal wasn’t really his thing, but he had done bodyguard detail in his time, knew the drill.

“Nothing’s going to happen to you on my watch, Martin,” he reassured him. Moviespeak that seemed to make Martin happy.

Jackson wondered what “crime” Martin had committed. Parking in a bus bay? Writing crap novels?

Martin was doing well, politely signing and smiling. Jackson gave him a thumbs-up sign of encouragement. Then he turned around, and there she was, standing next to him.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “Would you not do that?”

He looked for the knife, just because he couldn’t see it didn’t mean that she didn’t have it. In a previous life, under a previous regime, he expected she would have been a spy (or, indeed, an assassin). Maybe she still was.

“So, crazy Russian girl,” he said, “how’s it going?”

She ignored him and, without any preamble, handed him a photograph. The photograph showed a girl standing against a sea-wall somewhere. “Day trip to St. Andrews,” the crazy Russian girl said. He couldn’t keep on calling her that. She had said-what had she said? “Ask for Jojo.” That sounded pretty unlikely. A working girl’s name. “What’s your real name?” he said to her. Real names had always seemed important to Jackson. “My name’s Jackson Brodie.”

She shrugged and said, “Tatiana. Is not secret.”

“Tatiana?” Jackson wondered if that was like “Titania.” He had seen production photographs of Julia playing the queen of the fairies in a drama-school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, barefoot, almost naked, her astonishing hair let loose and garlanded with flowers. A wild girl. He wished he had known her then.

“Yes, Tatiana.”

“And the girl in the photograph?”

“Lena. She is twenty-five.” It was sunny in the photograph and the wind was blowing the girl’s hair around, tiny crucifixes just visible in her ears. His mermaid. She looked remarkably like Ta-tiana, except that her eyes were kinder. “Everyone says we look like sisters,”Tatiana said.

Tatiana had no grasp of the past tense, Jackson realized. It kept the dead girl in a present she no longer had a place in. He thought of all the other photographs of dead girls he had looked at in his time and felt the leaden weight of melancholy drop again. Josie had album after album of photographs documenting Marlee’s existence from the moment of her birth. One day they would all be dust, or perhaps someone would find one in a flea market or a garage sale or whatever they would have in the future and feel the same sadness for an unknown, forgotten life. Tatiana nudged him in his bruised ribs with a sharp elbow and hissed, “Pay attention.”

“What’s with the crucifixes?” he asked.

“She bought them in jewelers, in St. James Center. Pair for her, pair for me-gift. She’s religious. Good person. Meets bad peo-ple.” She lit a cigarette and stared into the distance, as if she were looking at something that wasn’t quite visible. “Very good person.”

At the sight of the cigarette, a boy in a Book Festival T-shirt came running toward her. She stopped him at twenty paces with a look.

“I found her,” Jackson said. “I found your friend Lena and then I lost her.”

“I know.” She took the photograph back from him.

“You told me last night to mind my own business,” Jackson pointed out to her. “But now here you are.”

“A girl can’t change mind?”

“I take it that Terence Smith is trying to kill you because you know what happened to your friend Lena? Did he kill her?”

Tatiana threw the cigarette on the grass. The boy in the Book Festival T-shirt, still hovering just beyond the range of her petrifying gaze, darted forward and picked up the burning stub. He looked like the kind of boy who would throw himself on a grenade to stop it from killing other people.

“How did Terence Smith know my name?” Jackson asked.

“He works for bad people, bad people have ways. They have connections.”

That sounded pretty vague to Jackson’s ears. “How do I find him?”

“I tell you already,” she said crossly. “Real Homes for Real Peo-ple.” She leaned closer to him in that rather alarming way that she had, and fixed him with her green eyes. “You’re very stupid, Mr. Brodie.”

“Tell me about it. Did Terence Smith kill Lena?”

“Bye, bye,” she said and waved her hand at him. He hadn’t realized until then that it was possible to wave sarcastically. And then she was gone, slipping away into the eager book-loving crowd.

Jackson managed to wrestle Martin away from E. M. Heller’s ambiguous clutches. “She prefers Betty-May,” Martin confided in a whisper.

“Does she?” Jackson said. He was struck by a thought. “You don’t have a car, do you, Martin?”

Martin’s car was parked on the street outside his house where he had abandoned it the previous morning. Crime-scene tape was strung across the end of his driveway, and an assortment of police, uniform and plainclothes, could be glimpsed coming in and out of the house. Jackson wondered if he had been identified last night on the Meadows, it was unlikely but it still might be best to avoid the long arm of the law. Martin certainly seemed to feel the same, shielding his face like a common criminal with the property news-paper that Jackson had just picked up. If Martin really had been phoned by Richard Mott’s killer, then he was withholding evi-dence, and by extension Jackson was now party to that. He sighed at the thought of how many charges he was stacking up.

He thought of Marijut in her pink uniform. “A maid, a friend, found a man who was murdered in a house we go to.” And this was the house. Favors again. They seemed to spread their tentacles every-where that Jackson went. You say connection, I say connection. What did Martin know about them?

“Nice women,” Martin said, “good cleaners. Wear pink.”

“How did you pay them?”

“Cash in hand to the Housekeeper. I always leave them a tip.”

“None of them…how shall I put this, Martin? None of them ever offered extras?”

“Not really. But there was a nice girl named Anna who offered to defrost the ‘fridge.’ ”

“Right. Shall I drive?” Jackson said, feeling suddenly perky at the idea. Martin’s car was an uninspiring Vectra, but nonetheless it was four wheels and an engine.

“No, no, it’s okay,” Martin said politely, as if he were doing Jackson a favor, for God’s sake, sliding into the driver’s seat and turning on the engine. They set off in a series of kangaroo hops.

“Easy on the clutch there, Martin,” Jackson murmured. He hadn’t actually meant to say that out loud, nobody liked a back-seat (or, in this case, front seat) driver, or so his ex-wife had con-stantly informed him. Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them.

“Sorry,” Martin said, nearly skinning a bicycle courier. Jackson considered wrestling the helm off Martin, but it was probably good for the guy to feel he was in control of something, however badly.

“Where are we going, by the way?” Martin asked.

“We’re going to buy a house.”