One Good Turn (31 page)

The Royal Mile was beginning to feel almost familiar to Jackson now, he felt like turning to the nearest person and pointing out St. Giles Church and the new Parliament Building (ten times overbudget—how could anything be ten times overbud-get?). The real tour guide was a melodramatically inclined middle-aged woman working for tips. It was the kind of job that a hard up Julia would take.

The bus trundled along Princes Street—no dark Gothicism here, only ugly high-street chain shops. It began to spit with rain, and less hardy foreign souls sought out the shelter of the lower deck, leaving only a scattering of Brits huddled under umbrellas and cagoules. He was half-listening to the tour guide telling them about witches (otherwise known as women, of course) being thrown alive into the Nor Loch, “which is now unrecognizable as our ‘world-famous’ Princes Street Gardens” (everything in Edinburgh was “world-famous,” apparently—he wondered if that was true—famous in Somalia? in Bhutan?), when he noticed a pink van, a CitroꬠCombo, in the lane next to them. They were at a red traffic light, and when it changed to amber, the van moved off. Jackson wasn’t thinking anything much at the time except for
You don’t see many pink vans
, but a semiconscious part of his brain read the words emblazoned on the side panel of the van in black lettering—FAVORS—WE DO WHAT YOU WANT US TO DO!, and another semiconscious part of his brain dredged up the little pink card that had been in the dead girl’s bra yesterday.

The two semiconscious parts of Jackson’s brain finally commu-nicated with each other. This was a slower process than it used to be—Jackson imagined signal flags rather than high-speed broad-band. One day, he supposed, the different parts of his brain would find they were unable to interpret the messages. Flags waving helplessly in the wind. And that would be it. Senility.

Jackson sprinted down the stairs, past the huddled masses in steerage, and asked the driver to open the doors. The pink van was farther up Princes Street now, Jackson could have kept up with it at a jog, but sooner or later it was going to untangle itself from this traffic and then he would lose it. He dashed across the street in front of a hooting bus bearing down on him (buses had somehow become the bane of his life) and, at the taxi rank on Hanover Street, threw himself into the back of a black cab. “Where to?” the driver asked, and Jackson felt absurdly pleased with himself that he was able to say, “See that pink van? Follow it.”

T
hey weaved their way through the leafy pleasantness of subur-ban Edinburgh. (“Morningside,” the cab driver said.)
No mean streets these
, Jackson thought. The black cab felt lumbering and ob-vious, hardly the ideal vehicle for covert activity. Still, the driver of the pink van didn’t seem to notice, perhaps the black cab was so obvious that you couldn’t see it. He supposed he should phone it in. He had Louise Monroe’s card with her station number on it. The phone was answered by some kind of minion who said that “Inspector Monroe” was “out of the office” and did he want to leave a message? He didn’t, thank you. He redialed the number (in his experience, a phone was hardly ever answered twice in a row by the same person) and had Louise Monroe’s out-of-office status reiterated. He asked for her mobile number and was refused. If she had really wanted him to keep in touch, she should have given it to him, shouldn’t she? No one could say he hadn’t tried. It wasn’t his fault if he had gone rogue, the renegade old lone wolf. Solving crimes.

The Combo drew to a halt, and Jackson said to the cab driver, “Keep on going, round the corner,” where he paid and got out of the cab, and then walked nonchalantly back round the corner.

W
E DO WHAT YOU WANT US TO DO
! A Julia-like exclamation point. Jackson wondered if that was strictly true. Could they, for example, turn
Looking for the Equator in Greenland
into a good play? Heal the sick and make the lame walk? Find his dead woman in the Forth?

“It’s a slogan,” the mean-faced woman unloading buckets and mops from the van onto the pavement said. She had an embroi-dered badge on the pocket of her pink uniform that said HOUSE-KEEPER, an appellation that Jackson found vaguely menacing. The Mafia were supposed to call contract killers “cleaners,” weren’t they? (But probably only in the fiction he occasionally read.) What would that make a “Housekeeper”? A kind of �ller?

“Favors,” Jackson said pleasantly, “that’s a nice name.”

“It’s a cleaning agency,” the mean-faced woman said without looking at him.

“I wondered,” Jackson said, “if you had the address for your office. I haven’t been able to find it anywhere.”

She looked at him suspiciously. “Why would you want it?”

“Oh, you know,” Jackson said, “just to go in and have a chat, about getting the cleaners in.” It sounded even more like Mob-speak when you put it like that.

“Everything is done on the phone,” the Housekeeper said. She looked as if she breakfasted on lemons—“thrawn-faced,” his father would have called her—but she had an accent as soft as Scotch mist.

“Everything on the phone?” Jackson asked. “How do you get new business?”

“Word of mouth. Personal recommendations.”

A sallow young woman, built like a peasant and radiating hostility, came out of the nearest house and, without a word, picked up the buckets and mops and carried them inside.

“I’ll be back to pick you up in two hours!” the Housekeeper shouted after her, and then she got into the van and drove off without giving Jackson a second look.

Jackson loped off in the opposite direction, trying to look insouciant in case the Housekeeper was watching him in her rearview mirror. When the pink van was out of sight, he doubled back and entered the house through the front door. He could hear the sounds of running water in the kitchen and someone clattering about upstairs. The noise of an aggressively wielded vacuum cleaner came from the back of the house, so Jackson reckoned there were at least three women in there. They might not all be women, of course. Don’t make sexist assumptions, they always got you into trouble. With women, anyway.

He decided to target the one in the kitchen.
Slow down, Jackson
, he said to himself,
you’re not in a potential threat situation here
. Armyspeak. The army felt so long ago now, yet it remained like a pattern in him. Sometimes he wondered what would have happened to him if his father had let him go down the pit instead of joining up. Every aspect of his life would have been different, he himself would have been a different man. He would be on the scrap heap now, of course, redundant, unwanted. But wasn’t that what he was now?

In 1995, he remembered the year, remembered the moment, he had been at home in Cambridge, when his wife was still his wife, not an ex, and he was a policeman and she was hugely pregnant with Marlee (Jackson imagined their baby tightly packed like the heart of a cabbage inside his wife), and Jackson was washing up after dinner (when he still called it “tea,” before his language was buffed into something more middle-class and southern by his wife). They ate early at the end of her pregnancy, any later and she said she was too full to sleep, so while he washed the pots he lis-tened to the
Six O’clock News
on Radio 4, and somewhere in the middle of that night’s bulletin they announced the closure of the pit his father had worked in all his life. Jackson couldn’t remember why that pit had made the news when so many had closed by then with so little fuss, perhaps because it had been one of the largest coalfields in the area, perhaps because it was the last working mine in the region, but whatever, he had stood with a soapy plate in his hand and listened to the newsreader, and without any warning the tears had started. He wasn’t even sure why—for everything that had gone, he supposed. For the path he hadn’t taken, for a world he’d never lived in. “Why are you crying?” Josie asked, lumbering into the kitchen, she could hardly get through the door by that stage. That was when she cared about every emo-tion he experienced. “Fucking Thatcher,” he said, shrugging it off in a masculine way, making it political, not personal, although in this case there was no difference.

And then they got a baby and a dishwasher, and Jackson con-tinued on and didn’t think again for a long time about the path he hadn’t chosen, a way of life that had never been, yet that didn’t stop him from aching for it in some confused place in his soul.

H
is target maid was at the sink too, wringing out a cloth and vig-orously wiping the draining board back and forth, back and forth. No crucifixion ears as far as he could see, although she had her back to him and was singing along to the radio in a foreign accent. There was so much background noise in the house that Jackson was unsure how to proceed without startling her. He was struck by three things: one—she wasn’t the peasanty one that the Housekeeper had barked at, and two—she had a great behind, made greater by the tight skirt of the pink uniform. “Two hard-boiled eggs in a handkerchief,” his brother used to say. His brother had been a connoisseur of women. One day, one day too soon, men would look at his daughter in the same way. And if he saw them looking at her like that, he would beat ten kinds of crap out of them.

Jackson had spent half his life in uniform without thinking much about it beyond that it made getting up in the morning eas-ier when you didn’t have to make a choice about what to wear, so the effect a woman in uniform could have always struck him as curious. Not all uniforms, obviously, not Nazis, dinner ladies, traffic wardens. He tried to recall if he had ever seen Julia in a uni-form, offhand he couldn’t really think of one that would suit her, she wasn’t really a uniform kind of girl. Louise Monroe’s black suit/white shirt combo was a kind of uniform. She had a little pulse that beat in her throat. It made her look more vulnerable than she probably was.

He never really got the third thought to the front of his brain because the woman in this particular uniform caught sight of him at that moment and reached into the dishwasher, plucked a big dinner plate from the rack, and in one smooth action sliced it through the air as if it were a Frisbee, aiming straight for his head. Jackson ducked and the plate crashed through the open kitchen doorway into the hall. He put his hands in the air before she reached for another plate. “You don’t take any prisoners, do you?” he said.

“University discus champion,” she said without any apparent remorse for having nearly decapitated him. “Why are you creeping?”

“I’m not creeping, I was looking for someone to clean my flat,” Jackson said, trying to sound like a helpless male (“Shouldn’t be too hard,” he heard Josie’s voice say in his head). “I saw the van and . . .”

“We’re not called cleaners. We’re called maids.” She relented a little. “I’m sorry, I’m nervous.” She sat down at the table and pushed her hands through her hair, her hands were red and raw with some kind of dermatitis. She said, “This morning, Sophia, a maid, a friend, found a man who was murdered in a house we go to. Was terrible,” the foreign girl said mournfully.

“I’m sure it was,” Jackson said.

“We’re not paid enough for that.”

Money. Always a good starting point, in Jackson’s experience. He removed five twenty-pound notes from his wallet and placed them on the table. “What’s your name?” he said to the girl.

“Marijut.”

“Okay, Marijut,” Jackson said, flicking the switch on the elec-tric kettle, “how about a nice cup of tea?”

“A young woman,” Jackson repeated patiently, “I want to know if she’s on your books.”There was a listless air in the offices of Fa-vors. The girl in charge, who seemed to be the only person in the building, spoke a poor kind of English and seemed to want will-fully to misunderstand everything Jackson said to her. He automatically converted to a kind of simplistic pidgin because deep in his atavistic native soul he believed that foreigners couldn’t be flu-ent in English, whereas, of course, it was the English who were incapable of speaking foreign languages. “Ears? Crosses?” he said loudly.

The office was in a neglected cobbled close off the Royal Mile.

The soot had long since been blasted off the face of Edinburgh, but the stonework in this place was still encrusted with the black reminder of the capital’s reeking past. It was a cold, unloved place, strangely untouched by the hand of either the Enlightenment or the property developer.

Favors was squeezed in between a restaurant (a self-styled “bistro”) and Fringe Venue 87. Jackson peered into the dim and meaty interior of the bistro, where the last few lunch customers still lingered. He made a mental note never to eat there. From the outside, the Fringe venue looked like a sauna, but it proved to be housing a disgruntled group of American high school children playing
The Caucasian Chalk Circle
to an audience of two men who looked as if they might have also mistaken the venue for a sauna. Julia had warned him about Edinburgh “saunas.”
“Don’t for one minute imagine that they are actually saunas, Jackson.”

The office had an unremarkable black-painted street door on whose jamb was fixed a cheap plastic nameplate that read FA-VORS—IMPORT AND EXPORT. No exclamatory promise to fulfill his desires, he noticed. “Import” and “export”—if ever there were two words that covered a multitude of sins, these were they. There was a security camera above the buzzer so that it was impossible to stand at the door without being scrutinized. He put on his most trustworthy face and got in by posing as a courier. No one ever seemed to ask couriers for their IDs.

He had to go up a stair and along a corridor that was stacked with industrial-size containers of cleaning fluids. HAZARDOUS MA-TERIALS, one of them said. Another sported a black skull and crossbones, but the writing on the container was in a language that Jackson didn’t recognize. He thought about Marijut, wringing the cloth out, cleaning the draining board with her washerwoman hands. If nothing else, he could report Favors to Environmental Health. Another wall of boxes was stenciled with one mysterious word: MATRYOSHKA.

Perhaps Favors was some kind of crime cartel that was running everything in the city. And what was it with the crucifixes? A Vatican-run crime cartel?