One Good Turn

“I bought you a signed copy.”

“Oh?”

“Stop saying ‘oh,’ Gloria, you sound like a walking zero. Are you going to put the kettle on? I hear poor old Graham got stuck in Thurso.”

The doorbell rang again. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Gloria said.

“Inspector Brodie,” the man said, stepping forward and shaking her hand.

“An inspector calls,” Gloria said. She presumed he was a fraud officer, but didn’t they hunt in packs? He followed her into the living room. She wished she had kept him on the doorstep, like a Jehovah’s Witness. All these unwanted visitors were an unwelcome distraction from the international banking fraud that Tatiana was committing in the kitchen, overseen by Gloria’s red KitchenAid and Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course.

“Tea?” Gloria offered politely, trying to remember if he had shown her any ID. Where was his warrant card? He was saying something about road rage when Tatiana glided in from the kitchen and said, “Hello, everybody,” like a poor actress in a farce.

“Oh,” Pam said.

“We have to stop meeting like this,” the policeman said to Ta-tiana. “People will begin to talk.”

Whatever else might have been said after that was never spoken because Graham’s golem chose that moment to put in the French windows with a baseball bat, and Pam started screaming as if she were trying to summon all the demons out of hell, and she didn’t stop screaming until the stranger appeared in the garden and shot the golem in the heart.

45

Jackson hadn’t intended to impersonate a policeman, yet when the door was opened and he said, “Mrs. Hatter?” and she said, “Yes,” it came out automatically. It had seemed the most natural thing in the world to say “Inspector Brodie.”

Gloria Hatter was dressed in a red tracksuit that reminded him, in a distant pocket of his memory, of Jimmy Savile on Jim’ll Fix It. Luckily she wasn’t wearing a medallion or smoking a cigar. She seemed to think he was with the fraud squad, and he didn’t go out of his way to disabuse her of this notion.

When he mentioned the Honda and the road-rage incident, she said, “I didn’t see anything,” and he said, “You were there as well?” in disbelief. A vaguely familiar woman with orange hair was sitting on the sofa, holding a copy of Martin’s latest book, The Mon-key Puzzle Tree. That detail alone sent Jackson’s brain spinning. Boxes within boxes, dolls within dolls, worlds within worlds. Everything was connected. Everything in the whole world.

The phone rang and an answering machine somewhere kicked in. A woman’s hysterical voice that could have been announcing an alien invasion shouted, “Gloria! It’s Christine! They’re here.They’re taking the computers!”

Jackson was distracted from this message by Tatiana’s entrance. He thought, This is too much, it really is. When Honda Man, complete with baseball bat, appeared at the French windows like a character in a horror movie and created air where previously there had been glass, Jackson began to wonder if he was on some new kind of reality television show, a cross between Candid Camera and a murder-mystery weekend. He half-expected a presenter to leap out from behind the sofa in Gloria Hatter’s living room and shout, “Surprise! Jackson Brodie, you thought you found a corpse in the River Forth, you thought you witnessed a man being assaulted with a baseball bat, you thought this little Russian lady here whispered clues in your ear (Yes! She doubled as that mysterious corpse), but no, it was all a fiction. Jackson Brodie, you are live in front of an audience of millions. Welcome to the future.”

They were all here, Tatiana, Honda Man, the only person missing was Martin. But, lo, he had thought too soon because here came Martin, striding with more purpose than hitherto across Gloria Hatter’s admirably well-kept lawns. “And also starring Martin Canning as the deceptively bumbling writer!”

Tatiana shouted something in Russian that sounded like a curse, while Gloria Hatter, less dramatically, said, “Terry, what on earth do you think you’re doing?”

“He’s gone!” he shouted at her. Spittle flew out of his mouth, reminding Jackson of his dog. “Mr. Hatter, he’s done a runner. He’s left me to carry the fucking can, hasn’t he?” And then, with one easy motion, he swung body and bat and smashed a glass display cabinet that contained a host of animal ornaments. The man really liked the sound of breaking glass. He turned back to the room and hesitated for a moment, as if unsure what to choose next, time enough for Jackson to herd Gloria Hatter and her or-ange-haired friend behind the sofa (where there was no TV presenter, thank goodness).

Terence Smith seemed to notice Jackson for the first time, and a frown settled on his dumpy features. “You?” he puzzled. “Here? Why?”Then he spotted Tatiana. “And you as well?”He lifted the bat again and swung it in Tatiana’s direction. Jackson made a dive for her, a rather inept rugby tackle, trying to bring her down and shield her with his body. Terence Smith caught him midair with a fierce smash at the waist so that Jackson folded in half as if he were hinged, and dropped to the carpet. A nice carpet, he noted, one of those thick Chinese ones with a pattern that looked as if it had been sculpted. He had a very close-up view of it. If he turned his head slightly, with great difficulty and much pain, he could also see Martin-still walking purposefully toward the house, his arm stretched straight in front of him as if he were leading a cavalry charge. At the end of the arm was his hand (as you would hope), and in his hand a gun. The Welrod. The Welrod that had puzzled Jackson when Martin mentioned it this morning.

Jackson thought, Well,okay. It was designed for covert close-up work but was still capable of being lethal at a distance, but only in the hands of someone who knew how to shoot because the sight on a Welrod was primitive. And you only got one shot because by the time you’d managed to reload you’d be either dead or arrested. And Martin was, let’s face it, a bungler, he was bound to be a crap shot.

The sight of Martin was too much for Honda Man. The wheels in his brain seemed to grind to a halt, apparently from the effort of trying to work out why all the people he wanted to kill were in the same room together. Then he gave up on the whole thinking thing and turned his attention to Jackson. If he had to make a start somewhere, his expression seemed to imply, then it may as well be on the one already on the ground, groaning in agony. He raised the bat. Jackson rolled over into a fetal position and tried to protect his head with his hands. He wondered vaguely what the other people in the room were doing while he was waiting to have his skull broken open. Surely Tatiana could do something useful with her knife? And failing that she could rip open Terence Smith’s throat with her teeth. She was doing neither, he could hear her on the phone, speaking in Russian very fast. He wondered what she was saying. Send lawyers, guns, and money? The woman with or-ange hair was screaming. She was doing the right thing. A lot of noise would bring the police. That would be good.

He was in a cocoon, isolated from the normal rules of time. His own personal end of days, counting every last lamb. He was back at home, the dimly lit kitchen of a small terraced house- the past was always dimly lit in his memory, he wondered if it was because the poor used low-wattage lightbulbs-he was sitting at a table, his brother and sister on either side of him, his father newly scrubbed from the pit, his mother dishing up some kind of stew. His sister’s lovely hair was in plaits (“pleats,” his father called them), his brother’s face was pale and open, he was wearing the same secondary-school uniform that Jackson would wear in a few years. Not Candid Camera but This Is Your Life. It was just a mo-ment, quite ordinary, the woman pouring milk from a jug. They ate their tea, their mother sat down when they’d finished and ate scraps. His brother hit him on the back of the head, and he rec-ognized it was Francis’s way of being affectionate even though it hurt. His mother said something to him, but he couldn’t catch what it was because something the size of a house fell on him at that moment. Jackson smelled blood and gunfire, the unmistak-able scents of the battlefield. All he’d heard was a tiny thuck kind of sound. You had to hand it to the Welrod, when they said “si-lenced” they meant silenced. It wasn’t a house that had fallen on top of him, it was Terence Smith, felled like big game, and now crushing him to death. Jackson wondered if he could get a new rib cage when all this was over.