One Good Turn (33 page)

“I was never a priest,” Martin said, “that’s disinformation. And forty-two,” Martin said, “I hardly think that’s late in life, do you?”

She said nothing, merely smiled in that sympathetic way again. He wondered how old she was, she looked about twelve.

He opened a packet of Minstrels he’d bought in the newsagent and tipped some into her palm. “What kind of books do you write, then?” she asked.

“Novels.”

“What kind of novels?”

“Crime novels,” Martin said.

“Really? That’s ironic, isn’t it? Fiction stranger than truth and all that.”They set off again, plowing through the clotted traffic as far as the next zebra crossing, where a seemingly endless line of peo-ple trailed in front of them. “They go slow on purpose,” Clare said, “gives them a false sense of power, but at the end of the day, they’re on foot and I’m in a car.”

“The author of seven novels based on private detective Nina Riley,”
she continued to read relentlessly. “It’s good you have a woman heroine,” she said. “Is she a real kick-ass?”

Martin pondered the question, he liked the idea of Nina Riley being kick-ass, it elevated her out of the tweed-and-pearls postwar world into something more dynamic. She knew how to fly a plane and climb mountains, she had driven a racing car, she could fence, although the opportunities for swordplay were few and far between, even in the forties.
“The blighter’s getting away, Bertie. I need a weapon—throw me that hockey stick!”

“Well, in her own way, yes, I suppose she is.”

“So do you make a living from it?” Clare asked.

“Yes. Better than most people. I’m lucky. Do you read much?” he added, in an attempt to steer the conversation away from him-self.

“No time.” She laughed. Martin couldn’t imagine a world where there was no time to read.

“His agent, Melanie Lenehan”
—wow, there’s a tongue twister—
“was quoted as saying,‘This is a tragedy in every sense of the word.Martin was just beginning to enjoy the fruits of his phenomenal success. He was writing at the top of his game.’”
Martin felt a pang of disappointment that Melanie had not bothered to come up with any-thing better than banal platitudes. Or perhaps that’s what she believed he merited.

C
lare accompanied him into the Four Clans and rang the brass bell on the counter. The thing about the police, Martin was beginning to notice, was that they behaved like people who didn’t need to ask permission, because, of course, they didn’t. Paul Bradley had possessed the same authority, it was something natu-ral and unstrained. These people didn’t spend their lives being apologetic.

A woman appeared reluctantly from the room at the back of the reception. She wiped a crumb from the corner of her mouth and gave them both an unfriendly stare. She had a bulky figure, and her ill-fitting gray suit and severe hairstyle, not to mention her de-meanor, reminded Martin of a prison governor. (Or rather his
idea
of a prison governor, never having met one in real life. Not yet, anyway.) She was wearing a badge that said MAUREEN, but she looked too formidable to be addressed with such intimacy. He caught a glimpse of a table in the back room, on which was a well-thumbed copy of the
Evening News
and a plate containing a half-eaten toasted sandwich. Even from where he was standing, Martin could see the blaring headline LOCAL WRITER MURDERED and make out his own grainy features in the photograph.

“Maureen” checked him in, unfazed by the fact that he was accompanied by a police officer. No mention was made of how he was going to pay the bill. He was handed the key to his room as if he were a prisoner who was allowed to lock himself into his own cell.

“Right, I’ll be off now, then,” Clare said. “Good luck, with the writing and ...everything.”

On his weary way up the stairs, Martin caught the eye of the stag. It regarded him mutely, an expression of moody indifference on its moldy features.

30

“M
urdered, Jackson!” Julia said, her face a pantomime of round-eyed horror, but she couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice.

“Murdered?” Jackson echoed.

“I was eating lunch with Richard Mott yesterday, and today he’s dead. Caught the umpire’s eye and Bob’s your uncle—gone.” She pronounced “gone” as “gawn” in a Dick Van Dyke kind of cockney. She seemed positively euphoric compared with this morning. “The police have been round interviewing everyone.
Murdered
, Jackson,” she said again, relishing the word. They were standing at the door of the sweatbox that passed for a female dressing room in Julia’s venue, into which actresses from another play were also crammed, most of them in their underwear. Jackson tried not to look. He felt as if he were backstage at a strip show, albeit a rather highbrow one, where people said, “I can’t believe it, he was in my light
the whole show
yesterday.” Julia herself had changed out of her sackcloth-and-ashes costume but was still dithering, unwilling to leave the world of performance behind. Of course, for Julia every day was a performance in one way or an-other.

“You said you had a drink with him,” Jackson said. “You didn’t say you
ate
.”

“Does it matter?” Julia frowned.

“Well, not
now
,” Jackson said.

“What do you mean, ‘not
now
’? Would it have mattered if he was still alive?” Julia’s husky voice rose to a more theatrical pitch. She could have played to the whole of the Albert Hall without amplification if she’d wanted to. “I had a cheese roll, he had pasta, it was hardly
cunnilingus
.”

The underwear-clad actresses all turned to stare at them.
“Please,”
Jackson hissed. When had everything between them become so jagged? Had Richard Mott paid for lunch? No such thing as a free lunch, except for the biggest fish.

“And how are you feeling, Julia?” Julia said. “How did your preview go?”

“Sorry,” Jackson said. “How did your preview go?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“
A
nother preview? Tonight?” Jackson said.

“Well, God knows we need one,” Julia said, drawing hard on a cigarette and then breaking out into a fit of filthy coughing. They were standing in the street outside the venue. Just over twenty-four hours ago Jackson had witnessed Honda Man trying to kill Peugeot Guy on this very spot.

“I told you this morning,” Julia said vaguely when her scarred lungs had recovered from the coughing bout.

“I didn’t see you this morning,” Jackson said.

“You don’t listen,” Julia said. What a strangely wifely thing for her to say.

“I didn’t not
listen
,” Jackson said. “I didn’t
see
you.”

“That’s okay, isn’t it?” Julia said, ignoring him. “You don’t have plans?”

He sighed. “No, I don’t have plans. What about now? We could have a drink. Afternoon tea?” Surely she would respond to those two words.

“It’s much too late for afternoon tea,” Julia said crossly. Her left eyelid twitched, and she took another long, desperate drag on her cigarette. “And Tobias is about to give us notes.”

“You always have notes,” Jackson grumbled.

“Well, thank goodness for that,” Julia snapped, “because we cer-tainly need as much help as we can get.” She ground out the cig-arette beneath the sole of her boot. She was wearing black lace-up boots with a high heel that made Jackson have unchaste thoughts about Victorian governesses.

“I’m sorry,” she said, suddenly contrite, pressing herself against him. He felt her body slacken, as if her strings had just been cut, and he rested his chin on the top of her head. She was taller than usual because of the boots. They both kept their arms by their sides, just leaning against each other like two unbalanced people trying to hold each other up. He smelled her perfume, something spicy like cinnamon that she hadn’t worn before. He noticed for the first time that her earrings were tiny porcelain pansies. He did-n’t think he’d seen them before, either. Her hair was mad as usual, you really could imagine birds nesting in it, he wouldn’t have been surprised if one evening a flock of rooks returned to roost there. (“Wouldn’t that be wonderful?” Julia said.) A chopstick that, in a victory of creativity over physics, seemed to be holding the whole edifice in place nearly poked Jackson’s eye out.

There was a poster on the wall behind them for
Looking for the Equator in Greenland
. It showed Julia reaching out to the audience in a manner that Julia said was supposed to be beseeching but to Jackson looked whimsical. The faces of the other cast members were stacked in a kind of pyramid around her, in a way that was, unfortunately, reminiscent of Queen in the video for “Bohemian Rhapsody.” It was pasted next to one for Richard Mott’s
COMIC VIAGRA FOR THE MIND
. Someone had taken a felt-tip pen and scrawled “Canceled” across his face.

She stepped away from him and said, “The preview should be finished about nine, although we ran over this afternoon. We’ll probably go for something to eat, then for a drink. Come and join us, help us lick our wounds.” He wished she was in a good play, one the critics would rave about, one that ended up transferring to the West End.

He had a sudden, horrible thought. “Your sister’s not coming up for your first night, is she?”

“Amelia?”

It was odd the way she said that, as if there were a choice of sis-ters, as if Olivia and Sylvia were still alive. Maybe they
were
still alive for Julia.

“Yes, Amelia.”

“No. I told her to come later, when the play’s run in a bit. She won’t like it anyway, it’s not her kind of thing. She likes Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov. I thought she could come up and stay for a few days. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

“Hold me back.”

“Don’t be like that, Jackson. Amelia’s all I’ve got.”

Jackson refrained from saying the obvious
“You’ve got me”
in case it provoked more arguments.

“Oh, I nearly forgot,” Julia said, suddenly animated (when had her moods started changing so quickly?). She reached into her big carpetbag, pulling out an assortment of God knows what before finding what she was looking for. “Free tickets!” she said with an enforced gaiety. When Jackson made no attempt to take them, she pushed them into his hand.

“Who did you have lunch with to get those?” he asked. Why couldn’t he keep his mouth shut? He’d meant it to come out as a joke (not a good one, admittedly), but it ended up sounding offensive. Julia just laughed, though, and said, “Oh, sweetie, I had to fuck two clowns and an elephant to get those tickets. The
circus
, Jackson, they’re tickets for the circus, they were handing them out for free, drumming up trade, the circus wallah chappie gave them to me. It’ll be good sport. Go. Relive the childhood you never had.”

“
A
lime daiquiri and a Glenfiddich, please,” Jackson said to the barman. It was a nice old-fashioned pub, no music or game ma-chines, lots of polished wood and stained glass. He wasn’t a whiskey drinker by nature, yet he seemed to have drunk a lot of the stuff since arriving. It must have been in his Scottish blood all this time, calling to him.

“And yet you’ve never visited Scotland before?” Louise Mon-roe said. “That’s odd, don’t you think? Do you think you’re avoiding something? Psychologically speaking.” No small talk then, Jackson thought, none of that getting-to-know-you stuff, pussy-footing around each other’s past.
“I was in France on holiday.”“Oh? What part?”
or
“You like country music? What a coincidence, so do I.”
Cutting straight to the chase instead—
“Are you psychologically damaged? Are you in avoidance about something?”

“I don’t know,” Jackson said. “Are you? Avoiding something?”

“Question with a question,” she said as if he’d just failed a test. “The psychopathology of it is interesting, though, isn’t it?” “That’s a big word,” Jackson said. “Pretty
and
smart, huh?” “You may behave like an idiot, but you’re not stupid.” Jackson wondered if that was supposed to be a compliment. “Anyway, cheers,” she said, taking a healthy swig of her lime

daiquiri.

“Confusion to kings and tyrants,” Jackson responded, raising his glass. He was under the impression that a daiquiri was the kind of drink you were supposed to sip. He avoided cocktails in case they arrived encumbered with parasols and sickly sweet cherries on sticks, but the daiquiri looked clean and inviting.

“Try it,” she said, holding the glass out to him, and he felt shocked by the sudden intimacy of the offer. He had been brought up in a parsimonious household where they tended to steal food off one an-other’s plates, not offer it up willingly. He could still see his brother, Francis, winking at him while he filched a sausage off his sister—and getting a box on the ear from Niamh for his efforts. Julia, on the other hand, would share with a dog, she was forever pushing forks and spoons into his mouth,
“Try this, eat this,”
licking her lips, sucking her fingers, he’d never met anyone before for whom the line between food and sex was so thin. The things she could do with a strawberry were enough to make a grown man blush. He had a sudden image of her in the Nell Gwyn costume, volunteering her breasts to the photographer, oranges are the only fruit. He had seen that on television, Julia had read the book, that was the difference between them. She had a little gap between her front teeth that gave her the slightest of lisps. It was funny—he’d always been aware of that, yet he’d never really thought about it before.

“No, you’re all right,” he said to Louise Monroe, lifting his glass to prove that he was happy with his own choice of alcohol, and she said, “I wasn’t offering to share DNA with you.”

“I didn’t think you were.”

T
he pub was on a street off the Royal Mile, close to the offices of Favors.

“I see you found the soot-blackened, whiskey-soaked, blood-sodden metaphysical core of the wen that was Edinburgh,” she said when she met him in the cobbled close.