One Good Turn Page 27

  Did she honestly think he was writing while all this was going on? Someone, someone he knew, had been murdered in his house. There were lumps of brain matter on his coffee table.

  “An antidote,” she said, “art can be an antidote to life.”

  Nina Riley was hardly art. “This is pretty spiffing, Bertie, we should think about taking a cruise more often. Now all we have to do is prove that our cat burglar is Maud Elphinstone and that the name on her birth certifi-cate is Malcolm Elphinstone.” It was, let’s face it, crap. “Are you still there, Martin? You know you’ve got the Book Festival tomorrow, so you have. Do you want me to come up and give you moral support?”

  “No, I don’t. I’m going to cancel.”

  “There’ll be a lot of interest.”

  “That’s why I’m canceling.” He put the phone down and returned to staring at the ceiling.

  Martin was running on empty, he had eaten nothing since yesterday, apart from the packet of Minstrels he had shared with Clare in the police car. He had spent a large part of the day feeling sick and nauseous for one reason or another—the lurid hangover of earlier this morning, the blood and gore besmirching his lovely house, the sight of Richard Mott’s zombie face—but now he felt suddenly ravenous. He would have liked a proper high tea— poached orange-yolked eggs on hot, buttery toast. And on the table a big china pot of tea and a cake shaped like a drum—a cherry Genoa or a frosted walnut. And his wife, quietly knitting in a corner somewhere.

  He might have been in a different room at the Four Clans, but the “minibar” was still devoid of anything edible. The sight of a can of Irn-Bru lurking in its innards made his stomach turn. He wanted to go home. He wanted to go to his house and crawl into his own bed and pull the covers over his head and make it all go away, but it would never go away because this was his punishment. And his punishment wouldn’t be finished until his entire life had been dismantled and all the little pieces of it had been fed through a mangle until they were flat, and no one would ever be able to put him back together again. One minute he was a full-fledged member of society, and with a tick of the clock, a turn of the screw, he had become an outcast. It took only the littlest thing. The arc inscribed by the baseball bat, a bowl of borscht, and a girl unwrapping her hair.

  A beautiful girl with blond hair wanted to meet him (Marty) in the Caviar Bar of the Grand Hotel Europe. He wondered if, being a foreigner, she found something attractive in his hesitant, stuttering Britishness, if instead of dullness she saw reticent charm.

  He had taken the grocer to the Grand Hotel Europe for afternoon tea, but the man had made a great performance of examining the little sandwiches and cakes and saying, “You don’t get much for your money, do you?” as if he were paying, not Martin. There were a lot of girls around, very well-dressed Russian girls, and the dying gro-cer raised his eyebrows at Martin and nodded his head in the direc-tion of one of them and said, “We know what they are, don’t we?” and Martin said, “Do we?” The grocer snorted at what he saw as Martin’s ignorance and made a face. “St. Petersburg brides,” he said and laughed. A flake of smoked salmon had adhered to one of his fleshy lips. Martin wondered what was the point of anything. Being with the grocer was like being with a walking, talking memento mori. “No, really,” Martin said earnestly to him, “I think they’re just attractive young women, I don’t think they’re ...you know.”

  “Yes, but what would you know, Martin?” the grocer said pa-tronizingly.

  They had taken tea in the light, airy space of the café, but the Caviar Bar was a darker, more sophisticated place, with its stained glass and copper, Russian Style Moderne. “We call it Art Nou-veau,” he said to Irina.

  “Da?” she replied, as if it were the most fascinating thing any-one had ever said to her.

  Even now, a year later, he could see the red and black pearls of caviar glistening on their little glass dishes of crushed ice. He didn’t eat any, the idea of fish was bad enough, but the thought of fish eggs was repellent. Irina didn’t seem to notice, she ate all of it. They drank champagne, Russian and cheap, but surprisingly good. She had ordered it without asking him and then clinked his glass and said, “We have good time, Marty.” She had changed for the evening, her hair was pinned up and her boots had been ex-changed for shoes, but her dress was high necked and modest. He wanted to ask her why she was selling souvenirs from an outdoor stall—had she fallen on hard times or was it a vocation—but he couldn’t communicate something so complex.

  He had spent the intervening hours between the Idiot and the Grand Hotel thinking about this upcoming encounter. He had imagined them chatting happily, her English magically improved and his few words of uneasy Russian transformed into fluency. He should have been with everyone else on an outing to the ballet at the Mariinsky Theater but had claimed a “bit of a tummy bug” when the grocer had come calling for him. The man went away disgruntled, an upset stomach not a valid excuse, apparently, to a man dancing with death.

  Martin had worried that Irina might have misinterpreted this whole scenario, that she would want payment, but the fact that she had footed the bill in the café seemed to imply that she wasn’t selling herself. Perhaps she wanted to find a husband. He wouldn’t mind, not really. No one would look at her in the St. James Center the way they would a Thai bride. You wouldn’t be able to tell just by looking at her that she’d been purchased. (Or would you?) “Yes, Irina Canning, my wife. Oh, she’s Russian, you know.We met in St. Petersburg and fell in love.A very romantic city.” She would learn English, he would learn Russian. They would have small half-Russian children, “Sasha and Anastasia.” He would provide her with what she wanted—financial security, a lovely home, children brought up in the affluent West, health care for an aging mother, an education for a younger sibling, and so on, and in return she would give him the illusion of love. Profit and loss, goods and services, that was what it was all about, after all. Business. At some point they had stopped drinking champagne and started drinking vodka. The vodka was so cold it gave him neuralgia across his scalp.

  Martin realized he was quite drunk. He wasn’t a drinker, one glass of good wine in the evening was his limit, and he didn’t have either the head or the stomach for cheap champagne combined with 80 percent proof Russian vodka. Time began to lurch for-ward in a series of snapshots, one minute he was rifling through his wallet looking for enough rubles to pay the bill, and the next he was in the front seat of a taxi being driven at a reckless and frightening speed. He wondered if he had been kidnapped. He heard Irina murmur something in Russian to the taxi driver. Martin tried to fasten his seat belt, but the taxi driver growled nyet at him and then said something to Irina that made her laugh. “Not necessary,” he said, as if Martin had insulted his driving skills. Martin laughed as well, he had given over control of his life to a crazy Russian taxi driver and a Russian would-be bride. He ex-perienced an unexpected feeling of buoyancy, something was going to happen, something was going to change.

  In a drawer in the bedside table at the Four Clans, he found a glossy plastic card with the menus and phone numbers for local takeaways. His stomach rumbled, and a jet of acid caught him in the throat. He could phone for a pizza, but he knew that when it arrived it would look as unappetizing as it did in the photograph in the menu, and anyway he didn’t have enough money to cover it. “Just nipping out for a bite to eat,” he said to the receptionist. He knew there was no reason for him to account to her for his movements, but Martin couldn’t shake off the oppressive sense of being in custody at the Four Clans. He had hardly any money to his name, he supposed he could get chips or maybe a bowl of soup somewhere cheap.

  “Good for you,” the receptionist said indifferently. She had a smear of what looked like blood on her chin, but Martin thought it was more likely to be tomato ketchup.

  He ended up in an Internet café where the prices were cheap. It looked like an old-fashioned corner shop, except that it was painted black, and written in some kind of Day-Glo purple on the
outside was the name E-COFFEE. Inside it smelled of old coffee grounds and artificial vanilla. Martin ordered a tomato soup that tasted of stale dried oregano but came within his meager budget.

  Surrounded by the computers of the Internet café, he realized again how acutely he missed the constant companionship of his laptop. He had mentioned its disappearance to Inspector Suther-land, who hadn’t shown much interest beyond taking down a note of the details. Martin could see that it must be quite low on his list of priorities. “An awful lot of things seemed to have happened to you in the last twenty-four hours, Mr. Canning,” he said. “Still,” he added cheerfully, “just think, one day, when this is all over, you’ll be able to write about it.”

  For a brief moment Martin thought about logging on to the Internet, he vaguely wondered if his death had made any difference to his position on Amazon (it could go either way, he supposed). He decided, however, against looking at Amazon or Googling his own name (or Richard’s). He really didn’t want to find evidence of his own death disseminated all over the Web.

  When he had paid for the soup with the change from his pock-ets, he was left with sixty-one pence to his name. He was only a ten-minute walk from his office—he made a determined effort to get rid of the quotation marks—and thought he might take a stroll along there and check it out, perhaps tomorrow he could escape the Four Clans, buy a blow-up air bed, and bivouac on the lami-nate flooring of the office. Martin couldn’t imagine ever moving back into his own house—even when the police were finished with it, how would he ever rid the memory of Richard Mott’s murder from his (ironically named) living room? And how would he ever get the room cleaned up, anyway? He couldn’t imagine the women of Favors in their nice pink overalls scrubbing bits of Richard Mott’s brain matter off the carpets and walls.

  The office had a toilet and a tiny kitchen with a kettle and mi-crowave. Everything he needed, really. In the office he could live his life simply and without ornament, like the monk he had never been.

  They had gone camping quite a lot when he was young—with the Scouts (Christopher fitting in with jovial fakery, Martin getting by) and several times with their parents, when their mother took on the role of Harry’s obedient corporal, endlessly boiling kettles on the rickety Primus stove while Harry himself instructed his pint-size troops in the blacker survival arts (breaking a rabbit’s neck, tickling a trout, wrestling an eel). Survival, it seemed, wasn’t possible without killing something else.

  Nina Riley was a great one for camping, of course. She had learned to love the outdoor life in Switzerland during the war and frequently loaded up provisions in the boot of her Bristol and took to the hills of her Highland home. She had a pair of stout walking boots, an army-style tent, and an old-fashioned canvas ruck-sack with leather straps in which she carried her thermos and thick sandwiches of beef and mustard. She boiled up water from peat-brown burns to make tea. She caught fish—trout in the rivers or mackerel from a sea loch—then she fried her fresh-caught fish for breakfast before setting off for a daylong hike, during the course of which she might well come across something suspicious and have to spy on it. “Looks jolly suspicious to me, Bertie. I think our friend’s a bit of a blackguard.” Bertie himself never got to speak much. The television producer had suggested to Martin that Nina and Bertie should “have some sexual tension going on. They’re both a bit bland, you know?” Martin wondered if he was going mad, if this was what it felt like.

  He passed the circus on the Meadows on his way from the café to the office. He had always found circuses unsettling, the per-formers fragile and quite superfluous to the needs of the planet, yet they seemed to Martin to behave as if they knew things he didn’t. The Mysteries. A Russian circus. Of course. What else? The whole of Mother Russia come to town to bring him to jus-tice over their lost daughter. “Here this doll special, very good artist. Scenes from Pushkin, Pushkin famous Russian writer.You know him?” Kafka had taken over the authorship of his life. He was being deleted, wiped out of memory and history, and quite rightly because that was what he had done to Irina. He had thrown her away like rubbish. He had erased her from the earth, and he in turn was being erased.

  Someone had been in the office. The place hadn’t been trashed or turned over, it was little things—the microwave door was open, and in the bin in the kitchen there was an empty polystyrene box, a half-eaten burger, and an empty Coke can. There was a sweet wrapper on the floor, a chair was on the other side of the room from where it usually was. The different-colored pads of Post-it notes he kept squared up against one another on the desk had all been moved around. It wasn’t so much as if a thief had been in; it was more as if an untidy secretary without enough work to do had spent the afternoon in here being bored.

  He opened the drawers of the desk, everything was still in order, the pens and pencils neatly aligned, the paper clips and the highlighters in the right place. Only one thing was missing. Martin knew what it would be, of course, before he even opened the drawer. The CD that was the backup of Death on the Black Isle, the last refuge of his novel. He slumped into the high-end office chair that came with the rental. That was when he noticed that a pink Post-it note had been torn off the pad and stuck in the middle of the unadorned white wall opposite the desk. Someone had written a message for him on it. “Fuck you, Martin.” He felt a tattoo of pulses and thuds in his chest. Something viral was happening to him. From his wake-up call this morning to his incarceration at the Four Clans this evening, everything had been unrelentingly awful.

  His wake-up call this morning! It had been from Richard. 1 missed call. He’d been in too much of a stupor to answer, and then he had forgotten all about it. He must tell the police. It was an im-portant piece of evidence. He took out his phone, it was down to its last bar of battery.

  He wished now that he had answered the phone this morning, he might have been the last person that Richard spoke to. “Oh, my God,” Martin said out loud, his mouth making the same oval of horror as the flaming witch on the engraving in his room at the Four Clans. What if Richard had phoned him during . . . his or-deal? What if he’d been looking desperately for help? If Martin had answered the call—could he have prevented Richard’s death in some way? (“Stop, you blackguard!”) Martin put his head on the desk and moaned. But then he had a thought. He lifted his head and gazed at the pink Post-it note stuck to the wall. Richard had phoned at ten o’clock, Martin remembered looking at the time on the clock radio by his bed at the Four Clans, but Superintendent Campbell said that Richard died between four and seven o’clock in the morning, so he couldn’t have phoned at ten. Unless he had phoned him from beyond the grave. On cue, in a way that even Nina Riley couldn’t have arranged, the phone in his hand chirped. The tom-tom thuds of his heart grew wilder, more erratic. “Richard Mott,” the screen said.

  He was on the pirate boat again, feeling it lift on its terrible un-stoppable ascension, taking his body with it but leaving his mind behind, moving toward its zenith, the nanosecond of a pause at the top of its curve. It wasn’t the rise that was the terror, it was the fall.

  His imaginary wife bravely took up her knitting. She had recently begun a fisherman’s Guernsey for him. “This will keep you warm this winter, darling.” Martin was toasting pikelets on a brass toasting fork. The fire was roaring, the pikelets were piping hot, everything was safe and cozy. Richard Mott had gone beyond the grave and knew everything. Martin’s heart was beating so hard it actually hurt. Was he having a heart attack? His wife said something to him, but he couldn’t hear her because the fire was roaring so loudly. Irina’s doll-blue eyes suddenly flew open. No, she wasn’t here. She couldn’t be in his lovely cottage. It wasn’t allowed. He was fading, falling, a curtain was coming down. Something black and monstrous was inside him, its wings beating in his chest. His wife’s needles clacked furiously, she was trying to save him with her knitting.

  Martin spoke tentatively into his phone. “Hello?” he said. No one spoke. His phone gave a last feeble cheep and died.
Crime and Punishment. An eye for an eye. Cosmic justice had come to town. He started to cry.

  32

  There were no elephants, of course. You didn’t see animals in circuses anymore. Jackson remembered only one circus from his childhood, contrary to what Julia thought, he had been through a childhood (of sorts). The circus he remembered from forty years ago (could he really be that old?) had been pitched on a field owned by the colliery at the edge of town, in the shadow of a slag heap. It had been full of animals: elephants, tigers, dogs, horses, even—Jackson seemed to remember—an act that featured pen-guins, although he might have got that wrong. Even now he could remember the intoxicating smell of the big top—sawdust and an-imal urine, candy floss and sweat—and the lure of exotic people whose lives were so different from Jackson’s that it had hurt him like a physical pain.

  Louise Monroe had refused his invitation. Julia had given him only one ticket anyway, although he would have bought another one if Louise had said yes.

  The circus on the Meadows didn’t hold out the same promises and terrors as the circus of long ago. It was a Russian circus, although there was nothing particularly Russian about spinning plates, trapezes, and high-wire work, only the clowns acknowl-edged their national origins in an act based on Russian dolls— “matryoshka,” it declared in the program. The word of the day. He thought of the boxes that had been stacked in the hall of the Fa-vors office, stenciled with MATRYOSHKA. He felt the peanut-baby doll in his jacket pocket. The layers of the onion. Chinese boxes, Chinese whispers. Secrets within secrets. Dolls within dolls.

  The ringmaster (what Julia had meant by “circus wallah chappie,” presumably) looked like ringmasters the world over, the black top hat, the red tailcoat, the whip—he looked more like he was about to orchestrate a foxhunt than MC a load of spangled kitsch. He was way too tall to hold any attraction for Julia. The circus, the program also said, shared space with “The Lady Boys of Bangkok,” Jackson was relieved some passing Lady Boy hadn’t given Julia tickets for his/her show.