One Good Turn Page 31

  She couldn’t help the flirting, it came automatically to her as if it were embedded in her personality. Julia flirted with dogs, for heaven’s sake. He had even seen her flirt with inanimate objects, cajoling a kettle into boiling faster, a car to start, a plant to flower.

  “Oh, come on, sweetie, if you just try a little bit harder, you can do it.”

  Perhaps he should look on it as a social service rather than as a threat, send her out to old people’s homes to give old guys the illusion of virility, make them feel good about themselves again. Vi-agra for the mind. There was something pathetic about old men. Guys who had fought in wars, witnessed empires topple, strode around boardrooms and factory floors like kings, won the bread, paid the dues, walked the walk, talked the talk, and now they couldn’t even piss without help. Whereas old women, no matter how frail, never seemed as pitiful. Of course there weren’t as many old men around as there were old women. Dry and brittle as old kindling maybe, but they were built to last.

  He took the photos into Toast and settled into a booth. He felt an emotion similar to that of unwrapping a gift, the same anticipa-tion, the same surge of excitement, only on the dark side—the ob-verse, that was the fancy word for it, the word Julia would have used. The photograph would be welcome proof that he hadn’t hallucinated his experience in the Forth, unfortunately it would also be unwelcome proof that someone, somewhere, was dead.

  A waitress brought over his coffee, and when she was safely back behind the counter he opened the packet of glossy six-by-fours. They were printed in the order they had been in on the memory card—the first three were indeed of Jackson, taken in the snow in France on Christmas Day, Julia trying out her new camera. He looked much the same in all three, striking awkward poses, managing a half-smile in the last one after much coaxing on Julia’s part. “Oh, come on, sweetie, if you just try a little bit harder, you can do it.” He hated having his photograph taken.

  Then there were a couple more of France and then nothing until Venice because Julia had accidentally left the camera behind when she returned to London after New Year’s. She had packed in haste, typical Julia, and they had made love, a last-minute farewell thing, when she should already have been on the road to the air-port, let alone packing.

  He dialed Louise’s mobile number. The phone rang for a long time.

  Venice still looked beautiful, but now rather than simply being holiday photographs, the little Canalettos looked like poignant images of halcyon days, a record of their golden age together as a couple. Just before the cracks appeared. “A couple? Is that how you think of us?”

  When Louise Monroe called him “Jackson” yesterday (“Let’s face it, Jackson, on paper you just don’t look good”), it felt like a switch had been thrown, just that little buzz of an electrical current kicking in. Bad dog, Jackson. He had thought better of himself than that.

  She was, let’s face it, his type. Julia was so much not his type that she was off the radar. Louise. This was what happened when you went over to the dark side. When you became bad Jackson, you started to lust after other women. “Watch out for Pisceans,” Julia had said. Was Louise Monroe a Piscean? She would be a new path. Not necessarily a good path or a better one, just a new one.

  After several rings a male voice (posh Edinburgh) answered, “The Monroe residence, can I help you?” Jackson was caught off guard, he hadn’t expected a man to answer, much less a pretentious-sounding wanker. He had expected better of Inspector Monroe. Before he could say anything, she came on the phone with a snappish, “Yes?”

  “It’s Jackson, Jackson Brodie,” he said.

  He had reached the last photograph of Venice. It was the view from their hotel window, over the lagoon, taken at the last moment by Julia (“Wait—we’ll forget this view”) before they boarded the Cipriani’s launch to St. Mark’s Square for the last time. She was right, he would have forgotten the view if there had been no record of it. But at the end of the day, no matter how beautiful, it was just a view. He could see what she meant about having people in pho-tographs, if she had been standing at the window with the lagoon behind her, it would have been a completely different photograph.

  Then there was the photograph of him next to the One O’Clock Gun with the Japanese, then the photograph of the Na-tional War Memorial. There was only one more photograph after that. It was black, entirely black. Puzzled, Jackson rifled through the pictures again. Same result—nothing. No sign of the dead girl at all. Only the black photograph. He was reminded of the black square that Julia gazed into every night, the raging Arctic storm. He was wondering if the photograph of the dead girl had been erased, perhaps accidentally. He knew that you could never erase anything completely, it wasn’t deleting a file that destroyed it, it was writing new data over it. There were programs designed for retrieving images. It would be easy enough for a camera shop to do. Or police forensics.

  “Did you want something,” Louise asked, “or did you just ring to annoy me?”

  “You’re not really a morning person, are you?” he said. He suddenly realized what had happened. In his hurry to take the pho-tograph—dead body, rising tide, and so on—he had left the lens cap on. Oh shit. He banged his head on the table. The other pa-trons of Toast looked at him in alarm.

  “Hello? Calling Jackson.”

  “Nothing, I don’t want anything. You’re right, I was just ringing to annoy you.” He remembered something, something the crazy Russian girl said to him last night, and he asked Louise what she knew about “Real Homes for Real People.”

  “Squirrels are eating my house,” Louise Monroe said unexpect-edly.

  “Okay,” Jackson said slowly, unable to think of any kind of response to that statement. He wondered if they were particularly big squirrels.

  38

  Louise was struck by an odd kind of terror, some vague memory of a documentary or a film—fact or fiction, she didn’t know—a man waking up in a stupor and finding that his entire family had been butchered while he slept, stumbling from room to room and finding their bodies.

  She woke up suddenly, too suddenly, tachycardiac and sweating, and it took several seconds before she was convinced it was a dream. That was when she heard the scrabbling. In the walls? Or above her head? Above her head. Claws or nails on wood, scratching, something running. It stopped. Started again, stopped again. She tried to imagine what was making the noise. Rodent Olympics in the attic. A couple of years ago she would have been able to put Jellybean up there, the feline terminator. Asleep on the bed, he shifted against her foot. She would have liked his professional opinion on the scratching, scrabbling things, but she didn’t want to disturb him. He slept nearly the whole day and night now. She had begun to think in terms of last days, that this might be his last breakfast, his last wash, his last walk outside. She no longer bought him cat food, instead she went to Marks and Spencer’s Food Hall and chose organic smoked salmon, slices of cooked chicken breast, and cartons of fresh custard, none of which he was able to take more than a few halfhearted mouthfuls of, more to please her, Louise suspected, than out of any real hunger. The last supper. Archie complained that he didn’t get fed as well as the cat, and he was right.

  She hauled herself out of bed and padded along the hall, where she opened the door to Archie’s bedroom—she just needed to be completely sure that the nightmare had been a nightmare. Both boys were sprawled in sleep, Archie in his bed, Hamish in a sleeping bag on the floor. The room stank of boys. Louise imagined a girl’s room would smell of nail varnish, pencils, cheap candy sweets. Archie’s room was essence of testosterone and feet. In the gloom, she could just make out the rise and fall of Archie’s breathing. She didn’t bother examining Hamish for signs of life, boys like him should be culled as far as she was concerned.

  Retrieving her heavy police-issue Maglite from under her pillow, she pulled down the Ramsay ladder from the trapdoor in the landing ceiling. She climbed up and lifted the trapdoor cautiously, imagining things jumping on her head and gettin
g tangled in her hair, nibbling on her ears and lips.

  The tiny attic skylight let in more of the morning than she’d expected, and extra illumination was provided through gaps in the slates. Louise was pretty sure there shouldn’t be gaps between the slates. It wasn’t really an attic, just a loft space that contained the water tank and had no flooring or power. An electric cable snaked across the floor instead of being snugged away in trunking, she could see that part of the outer plastic covering had been eaten through, exposing bare wires. The rafters and joists were rough and splintery, and there was no insulation. Louise wondered if it was illegal to build new houses without insulation. The loft seemed to underline the fact that the house had a permanently unfinished feel to it.

  Something moved in the far corner, something small and nim-ble, a gray whisk of tail and then it was gone through a tiny hole where the roan pipe met the small overhang above the downstairs living room. A squirrel.

  Louise swept her Maglite over the wall, she could see quite clearly now where the squirrel had made his getaway—a chink in the fabric of the house where a lump of cement must have fallen out, or (more likely, knowing Hatter Homes) had never been there in the first place. She ran the torch over the gable wall, an archae-ologist opening up a pharaoh’s tomb, and frowned as she traced a crack that ziggurated down the mortar between the bricks. It didn’t look like something you could blame on squirrels.

  She made the awkward journey back through the trapdoor and down the ladder. As she reached the bottom rung, she nearly jumped out of her skin when a hand touched her bare arm. Hamish held out a mug of coffee to her, the image of a helpful but-ler, except that he was wearing nothing but a pair of boxers. Ad-vanced for his age. She was suddenly acutely aware of the shortness of the old T-shirt she had slept in. The little fucker had been looking up it the whole time she’d been climbing down the ladder.

  “I put in milk but no sugar, Louise,” he said. “I thought you looked like someone who watched her figure.” She considered punching him, but she didn’t want coffee all over the hall, or a lawsuit from his banker daddy, an arsehole whom Louise had met at a parents’ evening. No coincidence that “banker” rhymed with “wanker.”

  “Thank you,” she said and took the coffee from him. “You’d better get a move on, Hamish, you’re going to be late for school.” She emphasized the word “school,” just to remind him that he was actually, technically, a child. She wanted to see a little scowl of hu-miliation on his smooth, bourgeois features, but instead he said, “Goodness, Louise, you really need to chill.”

  Louise pulled on shapeless sweats and went outside. She was still fuming at Hamish—now making breakfast in her kitchen, as comfortable as if he were in his own home. He made a surprisingly good cup of coffee, though. Archie had no idea how to make coffee unless it was instant. Louise wondered if Hamish made coffee for his own mother. It must be nice to have someone who did things for you. Perhaps in his own house he was as asocial and un-comfortable as Archie was at home, and perhaps, conversely, when he went to Hamish’s house, Archie went around like Little Lord Fauntleroy, saying, “Can I get you more tea, Mrs. Sanders?” to Hamish’s mother. No, that was a fantasy too far.

  She stood on the pavement on the opposite side of the road, sipping her coffee while scrutinizing her house for flaws in the brickwork.

  From somewhere inside the house, she could hear her mobile start to ring.

  “That’s quite a crack,” a voice said. She turned and saw her next-door neighbor unlocking his car. He nodded his head in the direction of her front door and climbed into the driver’s seat, his family piling in after him. Louise moved smartly away from where she’d been standing and, looking up, saw a fissure crowstepping its way down between the brickwork above the porch. “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down.” In the story, the Big Bad Wolf hadn’t been able to blow down the house made of bricks, built by the sensible pig. Unfortunately, a sensible pig hadn’t built Louise’s house. Louise’s house had been built by the Big Bad Wolf himself, Graham Hatter. What had Jessica said? “Subsidence or something.”

  “Fuck,” she said.

  The neighbor winced. He was some kind of Christian, he had one of those fish stickers on his car, and he obviously expected better of the police force. Weekday mornings he drove his children to school, Saturday morning to the swimming, Sunday morning to church. Mr. Straight Guy. The Vanilla Family. She hated them. “Fuck,” she said to see him wince again. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He drove off in a cloud of disapproval.

  Hamish appeared at the front door, holding her phone aloft. “You have a gentleman caller,” he said. He was very camp sometimes, so maybe he wasn’t the salacious hetero he pretended to be. Would she be able to say to her colleagues at Corstorphine, “My son is gay”? Say it loud and say it proud. It was a conversation she just couldn’t imagine somehow. Fourteen, she reminded herself, they were still children, they had no idea what or who they were. She crossed back over the road and snatched her mobile off Hamish.

  “Yes?” Louise said sharply into the phone and then was sorry because it was Jackson Brodie, and then she was even more rude to him, punishing him for the fact that she had experienced a twitch of pleasure at the sound of his voice.

  “I just wondered,” he said, “if the words ‘Real Homes for Real People’ meant anything to you?”

  “What?”

  “Real homes for—”

  “I heard you. You’re not still sleuthing around, are you? ‘Real Homes for Real People’ is the slogan of Hatter Homes, their head-quarters are in Edinburgh, still a family business. Graham Hatter’s a Scottish bigwig, millionaire businessman, et cetera. I live in a Hatter Home. It’s a pile of shite. Squirrels are eating my house.”

  She had waited until Archie and Hamish were sprawled in the living room, watching MTV with their breakfast, oblivious to any-thing that wasn’t their own stupid little world, and then she had sneaked into Archie’s bedroom. She struck the space bar on the hi-bernating screen of his computer, and a page of text came up. She scrolled down and read, “You know, Bertie, you’ve got to remember the rich aren’t like us.”

  “I know, miss.They’ve got more money.” It was a story or a novel. Archie was writing a novel? When pigs flew. And if Archie wrote a novel it wouldn’t be this kind of novel, it would involve the de-struction of the world by robotic cyber machines, with compliant sex-doll women thrown in for good measure. She went into “My Documents.” The novel was on a CD. Definitely not Archie’s, there was correspondence from an “Alex Blake,” apparently replying to fan letters. Other correspondence with the same address from a Martin Canning. There was a part of a manuscript, a novel—several chapters of something called Death on the Black Isle. This was what Archie and Hamish had been reading out loud last night. “I think there’s more to this than meets the eye, Bertie.”

  Then it had hit her—“Alex Blake” was the name of the guy whose house Richard Mott had been murdered in. Martin Canning was his real name—or was it the other way round? Her son, her harmless son, was in illegal possession of something that must have come from a murder scene. What else had they done? She felt something scooped out and hollow where her stomach used to be.

  39

  Gloria had intended the early-morning blaze in the garden brazier to be symbolic, a pyre for the past Gloria (Graham’s wife) and a signal for the future Gloria (Graham’s widow). She had imagined herself emerging from the flames like a phoenix, so it was rather disappointing that her wardrobe hadn’t made more of a show, even if it was only a couple of evening dresses—expensive designer things that she had worn for company dinner dances. Gloria had an uncomfortable vision of herself teetering into a succession of hotel ballrooms over the past thirty-nine years, mutton dressed as mutton, her body stuffed into the glittering carapace of a spangled dress, and her small feet (“pig’s trotters,” Graham called them) bound in unsuitable shoes.

  Because he would soon be dead, she felt sure of it. De
ad as a dodo. Dead as mutton. Dead as a doornail. Why a doornail? Why was a doornail deader than anything else? (The door itself, for example—equally dead, surely?) Did “dead” exist in the compara-tive? Could something be deader than something else? Dead, deader, deadest. Graham would be deader than Gloria. He would be superlatively dead. It had taken a lifetime for Gloria to realize how much she disliked Graham.

  There was more smoke than fire, so she threw a firelighter into the brazier and watched the little tongues of green and blue flames as they began to lick at a rhinestone-encrusted bolero jacket by Jacques Vert. Mineral to mineral, dust to dust. The clothes hadn’t reduced to the soft, powdery ash she had imagined.

  The electronic gates opened and closed several times. If Gloria hadn’t known that the man from the security company was down in the basement checking the system, she would have thought that a crowd of invisible people were being slowly filtered onto the property.

  She watched a thrush pulling an elasticated worm from the lawn. Birds (apart from magpies) were Good Things. Even when they were killing other things. The birds ate the worms, the worms might soon be eating Graham. Graham had eaten birds (chicken, turkey, duck, pheasant, grouse, partridge), so the cycle of life would be complete. Since Graham’s authoritarian regime was suspended unexpectedly, Gloria hadn’t eaten anything that breathed. Graham always said he wanted to be burned, not buried, at the end, but Gloria thought it would be a shame to deprive all those small industrious creatures of a good meal.