One Good Turn

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.

“Fuck’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.

53

Nina 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?”

54

Jackson 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 cliche 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,