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
“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.
“Jackson?”
“Yeah.”
“Your Terence Smith was a one-man crime wave.”
“He wasn’t mine.”
“He was also your basic moron, left trace evidence everywhere. The tech boys got bits of Richard Mott’s blood and brain matter from the baseball bat. He had Mott’s phone in his pocket, and when they searched his flat they found Martin Canning’s laptop, which is where he got his address from, I suppose. So it looks like he killed Mott by mistake, that he might really have been looking for Canning after all. Revenge for throwing his briefcase at him, I suppose, but he got Richard Mott instead. Who knows.”
“This is all very neat,” Jackson said.
“Well, not that neat. We still haven’t found anything to connect him to your nonexistent dead girl, nothing in his flat or in the Honda.”
“She exists, believe me. Terence Smith killed her on Graham Hatter’s orders. He used Hatter’s car to dispose of her-find that, and you’ll find the evidence. Hatter’s probably sipping cocktails with Lord Lucan now in South Africa or wherever murderers on the lam hide out these days.”
“And this is all on the word of a Russian call girl who no one except you has ever met. Oh, and Gloria Hatter. Who is also
“I know people who miss her,”Jackson said. “She was named Lena Mikhailichenko. She was twenty-five years old. She was born in Kiev. Her mother still lives there. She was an accountant back in Russia. She was a Virgo, she liked disco, rock, and classical music. She read newspapers and crime novels. She had long blond hair and weighed 122 pounds and was five foot five inches tall, she was a Christian. She was good-natured, kind, thoughtful, and optimistic, they all say opti-mistic. She liked to read and go to the theater, she also liked going to the gym and swimming, and she had a completely misplaced ‘confi-dence in tomorrows,’ so perhaps her English wasn’t as good as she claims. I think that’s another way of saying ‘optimistic’ again. And parks. They all like parks, in fact they all say more or less the same thing. You can see a picture of her at www.bestrussianbrides.com, where she’s still up for sale although she left Russia six months ago to see if Edinburgh’s pavements were paved with gold. That was when she fell in with Favors and met her nemesis in the shape of Graham Hatter. I think if you look you might find that our Mr. Hatter was involved with Favors, as well as God knows what else.”
“You don’t give up, do you? You have to come back.”
“No.”
“Jesus, Jackson.”
“No. I’m tired of being involved. I’m tired of being a witness.”
“Martin needs you to give evidence on his behalf, he killed someone. He saved your life. He’s your
“He’s not my friend.” There was a long pause. The Supremes asked him to stop in the name of love. “Anyway,” he said.
“Anyway.”
“Well, don’t forget,” Jackson said, “we’ll always have Paris.”
“We never had Paris.”
“Well, not yet,” Jackson said. “Not yet.”
55
Sophia’s Scottish boyfriend pounced on her as she came through the door, tugging on the zip at the front of her pink uniform. He found the pink uniforms vaguely pornographic, as if Barbie had de-signed her ideal nurse’s
