One Good Turn (49 page)
“Just because I’ve got big tits doesn’t necessarily make me ma-ternal, Jackson.”
“Julia, you would make a
wonderful
mother.” She would. He couldn’t believe that she didn’t want to experience motherhood. They had never talked about children, they had talked about marriage but never about children. Why was that? How could a man and a woman have a relationship and not discuss that?
“We’ve never talked about having children, Jackson. And it’s my body and my life.”
“My baby,” he said.
She raised an eyebrow. “
Your
baby?”
“Our baby,” he amended. Something passed across her face, an immense sadness and regret. She shook her head and stubbed the cigarette out in an ashtray on the bar. Then she looked at him and said, “I’m sorry, Jackson. It’s not. It’s not yours.”
“J
esus. Are you sure? You’re sure he’s dead? Have you called the vet?”
The shop assistant was watching him as if there were a magnet between his face and hers. Her features mirrored his horror, as if she’d entered into the drama of his life. Give the girl an Academy Award.
“Everything all right?” she said when he came off his mobile.
“That was my mum,”Archie said, “our cat’s dead.”
“Oh, no,” she said, her face all crumpled. Her lip actually trembled.
“Ooh, that was a good one,” Hamish whispered as they left the shop. “We should have thought about dead cats before, girls really go for that kind of thing.”
Archie felt bad using the cat like that, although it had helped him draw on some genuine emotion in his performance. He was sorry about the cat. He hadn’t realized he cared until it started yowling, it had been an awful noise, gave him the creeps. Its back legs had gone and it just lay there panting. Sometimes when his mother was out working, especially when she was working at night, he would get this horrid pain clutching at his chest because he thought,
What would I do if she died?
If she was in a high-speed chase and she crashed? Or if someone shot her or stabbed her? His heart went fluttery and he felt faint if he imagined it.
The way she loved that cat was weird. Her own mother died last week and she’d drunk a toast. “Here’s to the old bitch, may she burn in hell for all eternity.” But the cat died and she’d bawled her eyes out. And his mother, whatever else she was, was tough. He’d hated it when she cried.
He had tried to make it better for her, tried to think what she would have done if she’d been there. Candles and music, almost religious. He wrapped the cat in a sweater that belonged to her and then cradled it. It died in his arms. He’d watched it happen. There was a moment when it was alive and then there was a mo-ment when it was dead and nothing in between. One day that would happen to his mother. His family was too small, just him-self, his mother, and an old cat, that was it, and now the cat had gone. Hamish had two sisters, a father, grandfathers, grandmoth-ers, aunts, uncles, cousins, he had more relatives than anyone could possibly need. Archie had only his mother. If something happened to her, he’d be on his own.
He had cried when the cat died, everything inside him had suddenly felt too big, like it was all going to burst out. His mother came in and hugged him and he’d wanted to be a baby again and they’d cried together, she was crying for the cat and he was crying for the fact that he could never be a baby again. Then he’d made her a cup of tea and gone out and bought chips and they’d watched teatime television and it had been nice despite the cat being dead and his mother being so unhappy about it. She said, “We’ll get him cremated, the vet gave me a leaflet. You can get this little wooden box and have his photograph put on it, a little brass plaque with his name, and we’ll keep it on the mantelpiece.” Her own mother was sitting neglected on a shelf in the garage. There was
irony
for you. It had all been so
close
between them at that point that he’d almost admitted everything. About all the thieving, about finding Martin Canning’s wallet in the Cowgate (not
stealing
, the guy must have lost it), getting the address for his office from the wallet, breaking into his office (for fun, which it had been). Hamish could pick locks like a master thief. His goal in life was to rob his father’s bank. Hamish hated his father in a way that Archie found scary. But then Archie changed his mind about
sharing
because it seemed mean to do his mother’s head in while she was so upset. Some other time.
His mother put her arm round him and said, “It’s okay.”And it was, briefly. He finished her chips for her and let her stroke his hair, but then her phone rang and she sighed, “Sorry, that was the Force Command Center. I have to go, there’s been an incident,” and she’d left him alone. With the dead cat. Other mothers didn’t do that.
He heard her car pulling out of the garage and looked out the window to watch her drive away. A twenty-pound note floated past slowly, like a small magic carpet.
“
F
uck’s sake, Archie, police!” Hamish yelled at him, giving him a shove from behind so his arms windmilled around as he tried to keep his balance and not fall on his face. Hamish was off, running down George Street, abandoning Archie to his fate. He turned and saw two stocky policemen approaching. He didn’t even bother trying to run. He walked toward his fate. It was a moment he’d been walking toward for months, mostly what he felt was relief.
N
ina Riley climbed, hand over hand, like an agile spider on the rust-red web of girders of the Forth Bridge until finally, slick with sweat from the effort, she made it up to the railway tracks. She had no idea where Bertie was. Perhaps he had fallen to his death in the gray waters down below. She felt remarkably unper-turbed by his fate. He had been such an annoying boy, so obse-quious
(“Miss Nina, you’re topping, you really are”)
. He needed a hefty dose of socialism or a good kick up the backside.
She looked up and down the tracks, no sign of a train. No sign of the Earl of Morybory, or whatever he was called. Her so-called archenemy. No sign of the circus troupe of clowns that had been dogging her steps for days. A faint cry interrupted her thoughts. It sounded like Bertie. Was he calling for help? She listened intently. A feeble
“Help me, Miss Riley”
drifted toward her on a stiff estu-ary breeze. She ignored it. Then a far-off rumbling noise. A train. It was time. She lay down on the tracks carefully, she didn’t want to dirty her new cream leather trench coat, although, of course, it was probably going to get ruined anyway.
She stretched herself as nice and straight as a railway sleeper across the tracks. If you were going to do something, do it prop-erly. It was a shame there was no one about to tie her to the tracks with rope. It would be good to finish on a Hollywood note. Or perhaps not, that wasn’t quite her style and she wasn’t a damsel in distress, she was a modern woman doing the sensible thing. The noble thing.
The train was louder now. Closer.
Sacrifice. Self-sacrifice, to be more exact. She was doing this for Martin. She was going to free him of her forever. She was going to take Alex Blake with her into oblivion, and Martin would be liberated, he could have a fresh start, write something good, for heaven’s sake, instead of this nonsense. Regrets, she had a few, of course. She had never had sex—Martin wouldn’t let her. And she had never been to Wales, she had always wondered what it was like, now she would never know.
A little flicker of something she’d never felt before crossed her features. She thought it might be fear. No going back now. This was it. The nanosecond that would change everything. It was coming. It was here.
She entered the blackness where there were no words. Let there be dark.
“And he just sits there and says nothing?”
“Mm. More or less.The police said when they arrived he was gibbering about wanting to go into holy orders.”
“‘Gibbering’? Is that a clinical term?”
“Very funny. I haven’t made an official diagnosis yet, but I would say that he’s in some kind of post-traumatic catatonia, a fugue state. He shot someone, killed someone. None of us really know how we would react in those circumstances.”
“Do you think he’s faking it? He’s a writer, isn’t he?”
“Mm.”
“What kind of things does he write?”
J
ackson phoned Louise from the car. He had rented a Mondeo from Hertz and was driving down to London. It seemed he wasn’t ready to go back to France yet. Maybe he would never be ready. He was running, gunning for the county line at ninety miles an hour with his taillights out. He was heading for the Canadian border. He was on the dusty back roads of Texas looking for a little trouble. He was every song he had ever listened to.
He tried the word “home” in his head and it didn’t sound right somehow.
“Home is where the heart is,”
Julia said. Not usually a cliché kind of girl, but then she had never lived down to his expectations of her. He would have said his heart was with Julia, but maybe he had just thought that to make himself feel better, to make himself feel less alone.
“I’m sorry, Jackson. It’s not yours.”
He had said he didn’t care, that it didn’t make any difference who the father was, and he shocked himself because it was true, but Julia said, “Well, it makes a difference to me, Jack-son.”And that was that, it was over between them. From naught to sixty in one conversation.
“It’s better this way, sweetie.”
Was she right? He honestly didn’t know. What he did know was that he felt as if something had been ripped out of him without anaes-thetic. And yet he was such an old dog now that he was just carrying on because that’s what you did, you picked yourself up off the ground and, against all the odds, kept on slugging.
Bring it on
.
But really he wondered if his heart hadn’t been buried with his sister all those years ago while he sat at Mrs. Judd’s worn Formica-topped table eating a chicken pie.
New frontier, new future. London, the home of the dispossessed of the world, seemed like a good place to get lost and found in for a few days. In a service station in the Borders he bought a three-disk set of Tamla Motown greatest hits. He hadn’t suddenly changed his musical allegiance, but he thought it might be a good idea to have something upbeat for the road, and you had to hand it to those guys (although, as ever, he preferred the girls), they cer-tainly knew how to spin a tune. He couldn’t believe what a relief it was to be in a car, in the driver’s seat, behind the wheel. Even in a Mondeo. He felt like himself again.
“Hello, you,” he said when she answered with a rather tart “De-tective Inspector Louise Monroe.”There was a beat of silence on her end of the phone. The Velvelettes finished looking for a nee-dle in a haystack without finding one, then she said, softer than usual, “Hello you, back.”
“I’m on the road,” he said. (Four wonderful words.) “I’m sorry I didn’t get to say good-bye.”
“So your work here is done and all that?” she said. “The mys-terious stranger leaves town, looking back long enough to light a chewed-up cigar and wonder what might have been, before digging in his spurs and galloping off.”
“Well, actually, I hate to disappoint you but I’m just passing the Angel of the North in a rented Mondeo.”
“And Smokey’s singing the blues.”
“Yeah. Something like that.”
“You have to come back.”
“No.”
“You impersonated a police officer. You left a crime scene.”
“I was never there,” Jackson said.
“I have witnesses who say you were.”
“Who?”
Louise sighed. “Well, one witness is dead, obviously.”
“Our friend Terry.”
“Another one is asking to be taken to a monastery.”
“That would be Martin, then.”
“But the third one is pretty coherent now, apparently,”Louise said.
“The third one?”
“Pam Miller.”
“The woman with orange hair?”
“Well, I would say it was more peach, but yes. Wife of Murdo Miller, her husband runs a huge security outfit. He’s a crook but semirespectable.”
“What about the other two women? Gloria Hatter and Tatiana.”
“Gone. Did a bunk. Like you. Mrs. Hatter’s wanted by the fraud boys. And Graham Hatter seems to have disappeared off the face of the planet. Everyone’s very agitated by this case.”
“You’re running it, then?” he asked. “Your first murder?” It sounded odd, like a child’s primer.
“No.” She was silent for a while, like a criminal weighing up the options of confessing. “Actually.”
“Actually?”
“I had to leave as well. Personal stuff.”
He tried hard to remember her son’s name. He made a stab at “Archie?”
“No. My cat.”
He didn’t respond to that in case he said the wrong thing (he’d learned something from being with Julia for two years). “So
four
peo-ple left the scene of the crime?” he puzzled. “That must be a record.”
“It’s not funny.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“An astonishing thing happened that I thought you’d like to know about.”
“Astonishing things happen all the time,” Jackson said. “We just don’t notice.”
“Oh, please. You’ll be telling me you believe in angels next and everything that happens is meant. They got Terence Smith for Richard Mott’s murder.”
“Everything that happens is meant.”
“You don’t sound as surprised as I would have liked.”
“I’m surprised, trust me.” He wasn’t, he had received a phone call, no more than a murmur in his ear, a murmur with a Russian accent. He had no idea how, but Tatiana seemed to know everything. He wondered—if you had sex with her, would she kill you afterward? He thought there was a possibility that it might just be worth it.