One Good Turn Page 16

  “That all sounds a bit soap opera,” Louise said. “And I didn’t see any evidence of sweet-talking.” Quite the opposite, if anything. He had two million in the bank and he was traveling on buses? He didn’t look like the kind of guy who took a bus. “Not everyone has someone who’ll notice they’ve gone.” Was he talking about himself? He had looked right at her when he said it. Did he think she didn’t have anyone who would miss her? Archie would miss her. Jellybean would miss her. Jellybean would miss her more than Archie. Archie would hole up in his bedroom, playing Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, watching Punk’d and Cribs and Pimp My Ride and ordering pizza on her credit card.

  But then what, when the money ran out? He was a boy who could barely open a tin of beans. If she died before her time, then Archie would be an orphan. The idea of Archie as an orphan was a kick to her heart, the next worst thing to his own death (don’t think that). But then everyone became an orphan eventually, didn’t they? She was an orphan herself now, of course, although the difference between her mother being alive and her mother being dead seemed minimal.

  For Archie’s sake rather than her own, Louise hoped that she would die a natural death in her own bed when she was a con-tented old woman and Archie was completely grown-up and independent and was ready to let her go. He would have a wife and children and a profession. He’d probably turn out to be a right-wing investment banker and say things to his kids like, “When I was your age, I was a bit of a rebel too.” She would be dead but everyone would be okay about that, including Louise, and her genes would carry on in her child and then in his child, and in this way the world was stitched together.

  Louise could imagine being old, but she couldn’t imagine being contented.

  “Not many girls drown themselves, though, women aren’t noted for drowning.” She supposed Jackson Brodie was right. Not many women drowned, period. Louise made a mental list of women who had drowned—Maggie Tulliver, Virginia Woolf, Natalie Wood, Rebecca de Winter. True, they weren’t all real, and techni-cally speaking, Rebecca didn’t drown, did she? She was murdered, and she had cancer. The Rasputin of romantic literature—bad women need killing several times over, apparently. You could keep a good woman down but not a bad one. Louise had gone straight into the police after she graduated from St. Andrews with a first in English. Never a backward glance to academia, they had wanted her to do an MPhil, but what was the point, really? In the police you could be out there, on the street, doing something, making a difference, breaking down doors and finding small helpless children at the mercy of their drunken mothers. And you would have the power to take those small helpless children away from their drunken mothers and save them, give them to foster parents, put them in an orphanage, anything rather than leaving them at home to be a witness to their own ravaged childhood. Jackson Brodie didn’t seem like a hoaxer, but then that was the thing about hoax-ers and con men, wasn’t it, they were plausible. Perhaps he had fallen in the water and panicked, hallucinated, made something out of nothing. Invented a corpse out of malice or delusion or plain old insanity. He’d wrong-footed her at first by being so professional— his description of the body and the circumstances in which it was found was what she would expect from one of her team—but who was to say he wasn’t a pathological liar? He had taken photographs but there was no sign of a camera, he had found a card but it had disappeared, he had tried to pull a dead woman from the water but there was no body. It was all very shaky.

  He could have gone over earlier, left his jacket, and then sim-ply entered the water from Cramond, but as hoaxes go it seemed very elaborate.

  Or perhaps there was a dead girl, and it was Jackson Brodie who had killed her. First person to discover the body—always a prime suspect. He was a witness, yet he felt like a suspect. (Why was that?) He said he’d tried to pull her out of the water to stop her from floating off on the tide, but he could just as well have put her in the water. Deflecting suspicion from himself by being the one who called it in.

  She heard Archie stumbling down the stairs, falling into the kitchen, grunting something that was almost certainly not “Good morning.” His face was raw with spots, his ham-skin looked as if it had been boiled. What if Archie didn’t undergo a transforma-tion? What if this wasn’t his pupa stage, what if this was it?

  She put Weetabix in a bowl, poured milk on it, gave him a spoon. “Eat,” she said. A dog would be more capable. Being four-teen meant he had slipped back down the evolutionary ladder to some presocial rung. Some men of Louise’s acquaintance had never climbed back up again.

  She wanted to talk to him about the shoplifting. She wanted to talk to him about it in a reasonable way, not losing her temper, not yelling at him, telling him what a stupid fucking idiot he was. Lots of kids shoplifted and didn’t go on to a career of crime—take her-self, for example. Although she had, of course, gone into a career of crime, it was just that she was on the good side. Hopefully.

  Maybe it was regular, maybe it was only once, she didn’t know. Louise had been with him at the time, so she had to presume that it was some kind of rebellion against her, some psychological acting out. They were in Dixons in the St. James Center, celebrating her mother’s death by buying a big flat-screen TV in anticipation of the insurance money. Louise had taken out life insurance on her mother years ago, deciding she would never profit in any way from her life, so she may as well cash in on her death. It was a small policy, she couldn’t have kept up big payments on it, and once or twice it had struck her that if it had been really serious money (two million), she might have been tempted to knock her mother off. A simple accident, drunks fall down stairs all the time, after all. And a detective knows how to cover her tracks.

  Archie had taken something stupid—a pack of AA batteries that he could easily have paid for. It wasn’t about paying, of course. She was at the other end of the shop when the door alarm went off, and then a security guard ran past her, pouncing on Archie as he exited, laying firm hands on a shoulder and an elbow, turning him round, and propelling him back inside. The professional part of her brain registered the catch as businesslike and efficient. The unprofessional part of her brain considered leaping on the security guard’s back and jamming her thumbs in his eyes. No one ever warned you about how ferocious mother love could be, let’s face it, no one warned you about anything.

  She thought about looking helpless and throwing herself on his mercy, unfortunately looking helpless was not one of her greatest talents. Instead she marched up to the pair of them, flipping out her warrant and coolly asking if there was anything she could do. The security guard launched into his explanation, and she said, “It’s okay, I’ll take him in, have a word with him,” frog-marching Archie out of the shop before the security guard could protest, before Archie could say something stupid (like Mum). She heard the security guard shout after her, “We always prosecute!” She knew they’d be on tape and spent some anxious time afterward waiting to see if anything came of it, but nothing did, thank God. She could probably have found a way of making the tape disappear. She would have eaten the tape if necessary.

  Outside, in the underground gloom of the multistory car park, they had sat together in the cold car, staring out the windshield at the oil-stained floor, the concrete pillars, the mothers hustling toddlers in and out of car seats and pushchairs. Oh, God, but she hated shopping centers. There wasn’t even any point in asking him why, because he’d just shrug his shoulders and stare at his trainers and mutter, “Dunno.”The artful dodger.

  She could see that from his point of view it was unfair—she had so much power while he had absolutely none. A contraction of pain seized up her insides. Another turn of the corkscrew. That was love. As strong as the first time she touched him after he was born, lying on her chest like a barnacle, in the labor suite of the old Simpson Memorial Maternity Pavilion (now, at the new hos-pital, it was renamed “The Simpson Center for Reproductive Health,” it wasn’t the same somehow). Louise knew, at that first touch, one way or
another, they were stuck together forever.

  It seemed to her, sitting there in the car park, that he was as helpless now as he was then, and she wanted to turn round and punch him in the head. She had never hit him, never, not once, but she’d come close to it a thousand times, most of them in the last year. Instead she put her hand on the horn and kept it there. People in the car park looked around, thinking it was a car alarm. “Mum,” he said finally, quietly, “don’t. Please stop,” which was the most articulate thing he’d said to her in weeks. So she stopped. It all seemed a high price to pay for a desperate, drunken bout of sex with a married colleague who never even knew he’d fathered a child.

  She had a sudden, unwelcome flashback to the bump and grind of Archie’s genesis. PC Louise Monroe in the back of an un-marked squad car with DI Michael Pirie, the night of his leaving “do.” He had a new promotion and an old wife, but that hadn’t stopped him. People used to think that the circumstances of a child’s conception shaped that child’s character. She hoped not.

  “What?”Archie said, glaring at her, a mustache of milk around his mouth.

  “Ophelia,” Louise said. “She drowned. Ophelia drowned.”

  Louise went up to the bathroom and opened the window, cleaned the shower, picked up sodden towels, flushed the toilet. She wondered if he would ever be house-trained. It was blankly impossible to modify his behavior, she wondered what would happen to him under the threat of torture, perhaps she should sell him to science or the army. The CIA would find him a fascinating subject—the boy who couldn’t be broken.

  She put in her contacts, applied makeup, enough to have made an effort, not enough to be blatantly a woman, a white shirt beneath a trim black suit from Next, court shoes with a slight heel, no jewelry apart from a watch and a pair of modest gold studs in her ears. She would go back out to Cramond as soon as she could, join her team to dot the i’s and cross the t’s on the case that never was, but this morning she was due to give evidence in Alistair Crichton’s court—a car scam, stealing high-end cars in Edinburgh and selling them in Glasgow with new plates. She and a DS, Jim Tucker, had worked doggedly to put a case together for the procu-rator fiscal, Crichton was an old bastard and a stickler for proce-dure and she didn’t want her appearance to get in the way of her evidence. She had done Jim a big favor last year. He had a teenage daughter, Lily, one of those clean-cut types, thick hair, lots of good orthodontic work, all her grade exams on the piano. Lily had just triumphed in her Highers and was set to go to university on a Royal Navy scholarship to study medicine, and then Louise had helped to net her in a drugs raid on a flat in Sciennes. It turned out to be just a bit of dope, sixth-years from Gillespie’s, and a couple of first-year university students, Louise had recognized Lily straightaway. They were all taken down to the station, and a couple of them were charged for possession. It was one of those jobs that looked like overkill afterward, lots of shouting and breaking down of doors, and in the confusion Louise had armlocked Lily and walked her out of the flat and hissed in her ear, “Scarper,” and more or less pushed her down the stairs, into the night, and into her safe, high-achieving future.

  Jim was a good sort, he was so grateful he would have cut off a limb and presented it to her in a glass case if she’d asked. Lily must be honest beyond the call of duty because she told her father about it, Louise couldn’t imagine herself owning up at that age. Any age, come to that. Louise wouldn’t have said anything to Jim about the bust, didn’t think it was nice to tell tales. The way she looked at it, if Jim ever found himself in a similar situation with Archie, Archie would have a get-out-of-jail-free card and at least one member of the Lothian and Borders Police on his side. Two if you count his mother, of course.

  She emptied half a packet of Tic Tacs into her mouth, and she was as ready as she ever would be.

  19

  Richard Mott didn’t wake. He lay untroubled in Martin Canning’s living room in Merchiston. It was a large neo-Gothic Victorian mansion, with something of the manse about it. The front lawn was dominated by a single enormous monkey puzzle tree, planted when the house was still quite new. The house was masked from the road by ranks of mature trees and shrubbery. Nowadays the intricate cabling of the monkey puzzle tree’s roots extended far beyond the front lawn, curling around gas and sewer pipes in the street and poking silently into other people’s gardens.

  The smashed-up Rolex on Richard Mott’s wrist showed he had died at quarter to six (a flat line, appropriately), watched over by only the little red demon eye on the television set—the “fantas-tic” one that for a second he had hoped to barter for his life—and with nothing for company but the faint noises of the suburban world, growing louder as the morning wore on. The milk van had rattled its way along the street. It was the kind of affluent suburb that still had milk vans delivering glass bottles on the doorstep. The post had slipped through the letter box in a subdued way. In Lon-don, the day never began for Richard Mott until the post arrived. He always felt that days when there was no post (although there was always post) never really began at all. Today there was post, nearly all of it for him, redirected “c/o Martin Canning”—a check from his agent, a postcard from a friend in Greece, two fan letters balanced by two hate letters. Despite the arrival of the post, however, this day was never going to begin for Richard Mott.

  It was the maid who found him. The maid was Czech, from Prague, a physics graduate. Her name was Sophia, and she was spending the summer “working her arse off”for a pittance. They weren’t “maids,” they were cleaners, “maid” was a stupid old-fashioned name. They were employed by a firm called Favors, and they arrived mop-handed in a pink van under the supervision of a gang leader who was called the “Housekeeper”—a woman who came originally from the Isle of Lewis and who was mean to all the maids. With agency fees and hidden bonuses, it cost three times as much to hire Favors as it did to have a cleaner come in a couple of days a week. So, generally speaking, the houses they went to belonged to people who were too rich or too stupid (or both) to think of a cheaper alternative. They had little pink busi-ness cards on which the strapline read, WE HAVE DONE YOU A FAVOR! Sophia had learned the word “strapline” (and the word “arse” and many other things) from her Scottish boyfriend, who was a marketing graduate.When the maids finished they were supposed to leave one of the little pink cards, after they had written on them, “Your maids today were Maria and Sharon.” Or who-ever. Half the maids were foreign, most of them Eastern Euro-pean. “Economic immigration,” they called it, but really it was just slave labor.

  They were given a checklist of tasks by the Housekeeper. This checklist had been agreed on beforehand with the owner of the house and always said obvious things such as “Clean bathroom sink,” “Vacuum stairs,” “Change beds.” It never said “Clean up cat sick,” “Change spunky sheets,” “Take hair out of bathroom plug hole,” which would have been more like the truth. Some people were pigs, they left their nice houses in a disgusting state. “Spunky,” obviously, was a word Sophia had learned from her Scottish boyfriend. He was a good source of the vernacular even though he was very shallow, but a great fuck (his words), which was what you wanted in a foreign boyfriend. Otherwise, why bother?

  The Housekeeper usually drove them in the pink van and dropped them off and then did God knows what, nothing too strenuous, probably. Sophia imagined her sitting somewhere in a comfortable chair, eating chocolate biscuits, and watching Good Morning.

  They had three houses to clean in Merchiston, all close to one another, so it was probably word of mouth—because whatever else they were, the Favors maids were good at cleaning. The house with the monkey puzzle tree (very nice, Sophia fantasized about living there) was somewhere they went every week. The owner was hardly ever there, when they came in the front door, he disappeared out the back door, like a cat. He was a writer, the Housekeeper said, so don’t ever disturb any papers, any writing. It was the cleanest, tidiest house they went to, nothing ever out of place, beds made, towels fo
lded, all the food in the fridge inside neat plastic containers from Lakeland. You could have sat in the kitchen and drunk coffee and read the newspaper and then left without doing any cleaning, and the Housekeeper would never have known. But Sophia wouldn’t do that. She wasn’t lazy. In this house she polished and swept and vacuumed even more because the writer deserved it for being so clean himself. And now also because the writer had a visitor who was a pig, who smoked and drank and left his clothes on the floor and, if he caught sight of her, said filthy, suggestive things.

  He had offered money to one of the other maids, a sad Ro-manian girl, and she had gone upstairs with him (“to have it off”), and then he had given her only half the money and a signed pho-tograph of himself. “Wanker,” all the maids agreed, Sophia had taught them the word, courtesy of her Scottish boyfriend. It was a very useful word, they said. But the girl was stupid to have gone with him. She cried for days afterward, spilling tears onto nice polished surfaces and using up clean towels. She was a virgin, she said, but she needed the money. Everyone needed money. Lots of the girls were here illegally, some had their passports confiscated, some disappeared after a while. Sex traffic. It would happen to the Romanian girl, you could see it in her eyes. There were rumors about bad things that had happened to some of the girls that worked for Favors, but there were always rumors and there were always bad things happening to girls. That was life.

  Sophia liked to think that the writer wasn’t too rich or stupid to hire a regular cleaner but that he maybe liked the impersonal nature of Favors’ service. Sophia imagined that writers were peo-ple who didn’t like to get too close to other people in case it stopped them from writing.

  Today they were short-staffed because there was “flu going round,” and the Housekeeper said, “Start on your own,” so Sophia rapped on the door of the writer’s house. She had a key, but they were supposed to knock first. She rapped again loudly, the writer had a good brass door knocker in the shape of a lion’s head, and there was something satisfying about using it, like being the po-lice. When there was no answer, she let herself in with the key and announced, “Favors here,” in a loud singsong voice just in case the writer was in bed having it off with someone. Very unlikely, no sign of a sex life with a woman or a man anywhere in the writer’s house. Not even any porn. A few photographs in frames, she rec-ognized Notre Dame in Paris, Dutch houses along a canal— tourist photographs like postcards, no people in the photographs.