One Good Turn

44

This was the deal. When Celine Dion had sung her lungs out, when Tatiana had eaten her way through the fruit bowl, she reached into her bra, conjured out a Memory Stick, and said, “Do you know what this is, Gloria?”

“A Memory Stick, I believe,” Gloria said.

“Whose Memory Stick, Gloria? Whose?”

“Yours?” Gloria hazarded, wondering if she was being subjected to some form of Slavic Socratic irony. “I know it’s not mine,” she added.

Tatiana handed her the Memory Stick and said, “No, it’s ours, Gloria. You share with me, fifty-fifty.”

“Share what?”

“Everything.”

The Magus’ book. Graham’s secret accounts, all contained on one tiny tablet of plastic that Tatiana had taken from the pocket of Graham’s summer-weight wool, as he lay flapping like a fish on his Apex bed.

“I thought you tried to resuscitate him,” Gloria said thought-fully. Tatiana made a sad clown face. “Don’t,” Gloria said with a shudder.

There had been something on the radio this morning about horses. Someone had left dozens of horses locked up in a stable and gone away and all the horses had starved to death. Gloria thought about the big brown eyes of horses, she thought about Black Beauty, the saddest book ever written. She thought about all the horses with sad brown eyes you could help if you had a lot of money. The headless kittens, the Sellotaped budgies, the mangled boys.

“Hm,” she said.

Gloria gazed thoughtfully at her screen saver of border collie puppies for a while and then tapped the space bar and brought her computer back to life. She typed in “Ozymandias” and, just like that, she entered into Graham’s occult books.

“How did you know the password?” she asked Tatiana.

“I know everything.” Gloria could think of a lot of things that Tatiana probably didn’t know (how to make scones, the whereabouts of the Scilly Isles, the terror of aging) but didn’t bother challenging her. She was oddly touched that Graham had used the title of the Shelley poem for his password. Perhaps he had, after all, appreciated the gift she had given him. Or perhaps he was just looking for the most obscure word he could find.

Graham’s Memory Stick contained a lot of the humdrum of commerce-feasibility studies, projected figures, tight margins. The world seemed full of so many vague concepts, but you had to wonder-were these actually important? (Were they even real?) Shouldn’t a person’s life be based on simple, more tangible things-a bed of sweet peas staked in a garden border, a child on a swing, a certain slant of winter light. A basket of kittens.

There was a dismayingly large cache of e-mails that Graham had saved from Maggie Louden, little electronic billet-doux of the “My darling, what we have is so wonderful” type. Tatiana read, in a drawling vampiric accent that rendered the sentiments ludicrous, “Have you talked about the divorce with Gloria yet? You promised you would talk to her this weekend.”

Attached to one of the e-mails was a folder of photographs, some of Graham and Maggie, although mostly of Maggie alone, taken by Graham, presumably. Gloria couldn’t remember the last time that Graham had taken her photograph.

“Voddabitch,” Gloria said.

He had taken Maggie to York Races for Ladies Day, an outing that Gloria herself had suggested to Graham as something they might do together, “a day out.” Maggie and Graham had stayed at Middlethorpe Hall (“Really lovely, darling.You are a god”). He had bought her a pink diamond-“Gorgeous,gorgeous,gorgeous.It’s huge! (Like you!) Someone’s going to get a treat tonight!”

His e-mails to her tended to be more prosaic. “The new ‘Ivan-hoe’ is going to be a four-bedroom terrace, integral garage, we’re trying to nail down sales before construction begins. Make a point of the laundry room. It’s a big selling point.” Everything was business, even love.

Gloria couldn’t have a pink sink, but his mistress could have a pink diamond as big as the Balmoral. It seemed a shame now that Graham’s imminent demise might rob Gloria of the satisfaction of watching him squirm in the divorce courts. Half his income, half his business.

“Half of nothing, Gloria,” Tatiana said to her. “Remember, Proceeds of Crime Act 2002.”

Somehow Gloria wasn’t surprised that Tatiana was up to date with the criminal justice system.

“It’s all there, Gloria,”Tatiana said, and she was right, it was- the false accounting, the illegal bank transfers, the shell companies, the tax evasion. The money that Graham had passed through Hatter Homes’ accounts, not just for himself but for other people- the man was a money launderer for hire, washing and scrubbing away at the filthy lucre as if it were a vocation. There were codes and passwords for bank accounts in this country and in Jersey, in the Caymans, in Switzerland. The breadth and sprawl of it all was astounding. He owned the whole world.

“He owns Favors?” Gloria asked, squinting at the screen. “With Murdo?”

“Everything is business, Gloria. Business and lies. You’re old woman, you should know that by now. Move,” she commanded. Gloria shifted out of her seat, and Tatiana took over at the computer, her hands poised above the keyboard like those of a virtu-oso pianist about to commit the performance of her career.

Gloria was intrigued. “What exactly are you doing? Are you transferring money? Into the housekeeping account?” she added hopefully.

“If I tell you, I have to kill you,” Tatiana said. She was like a comedy Russian. Gloria wondered if she really was Russian. There was no reason why she should be who she said she was. No rea-son why anyone should be who they said they were. People believed whatever they were told. They believed Graham was in Thurso. In the future, the future that was just beyond the path edged with antirrhinums and salvias, Gloria could be whoever she wanted to be.

Tatiana burst out laughing, slapped Gloria on the arm (quite hard), and said, “Just joking, Gloria. I’m moving it into one of the Swiss accounts. Take fraud cops forever to find it, long after other accounts are frozen, and by then you and me”-she snapped her fingers in the air-“pouf! We are gone.”

“But how will we get the money out?” Gloria puzzled.

“Gloria, you are such idyot! It’s Hatter Homes’ account, you’re director of company, you can take what you want out. You’re im-portant businesswoman.You better phone them and tell them we’re coming because this is lot of money. Don’t worry, Gloria. remember, I work in bank.”

The doorbell rang. It was Pam.

“This isn’t really a good time,” Gloria said.

“Your security gates are wide-open,” Pam said, walking into the hallway. “Anyone could walk in. I’m just on my way back from the Book Festival.” She made her way, without being invited, into the living room and sat on the peach-damask sofa. Gloria followed, wondering how to get rid of her, perhaps she could just snap her fingers and pouf!-she would be gone.

“I have to say, you didn’t miss much,” Pam said. “As events go it was very unsatisfactory, it managed to be both argumentative and lackluster at the same time. And I wasn’t convinced by the filled rolls. Dougal Tarvit was all right, but as for Alex Blake, what a disappointment.”

“Oh?”

“So short. Definitely something suspicious about him. I’m surprised the police don’t have him in custody yet for Richard Mott’s murder.”

“Oh?”

“I bought you a signed copy.”

“Oh?”

“Stop saying ‘oh,’ Gloria, you sound like a walking zero. Are you going to put the kettle on? I hear poor old Graham got stuck in Thurso.”

The doorbell rang again. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Gloria said.

“Inspector Brodie,” the man said, stepping forward and shaking her hand.

“An inspector calls,” Gloria said. She presumed he was a fraud officer, but didn’t they hunt in packs? He followed her into the living room. She wished she had kept him on the doorstep, like a Jehovah’s Witness. All these unwanted visitors were an unwelcome distraction from the international banking fraud that Tatiana was committing in the kitchen, overseen by Gloria’s red KitchenAid and Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course.

“Tea?” Gloria offered politely, trying to remember if he had shown her any ID. Where was his warrant card? He was saying something about road rage when Tatiana glided in from the kitchen and said, “Hello, everybody,” like a poor actress in a farce.

“Oh,” Pam said.

“We have to stop meeting like this,” the policeman said to Ta-tiana. “People will begin to talk.”

Whatever else might have been said after that was never spoken because Graham’s golem chose that moment to put in the French windows with a baseball bat, and Pam started screaming as if she were trying to summon all the demons out of hell, and she didn’t stop screaming until the stranger appeared in the garden and shot the golem in the heart.