One Good Turn

uniform. Sophia wore hers very short, and he often wondered if there were men in the houses she went to who spent their time trying to get a glance up her skirt as she bent over or reached up. When he thought of her at work, feather dusters tended to be involved as well as leaning provocatively across beds or kneeling on floors to scrub them with her pert Czech arse in the air.

“Wait,” she said, pushing him away.

“Can’t,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about this moment all day.”

She wanted to take her jacket off, have a glass of red wine, eat beans on toast, wash her face, put her feet up, do a hundred things that were higher up on her list of priorities. She’d had to work an extra hour today. “New practices,” the Housekeeper told them. The Housekeeper was new too, the mean-faced Scottish House-keeper had disappeared overnight, and now they had a tetchy Mus-covite bitch in her place. Favors was “under new management.” Sophia didn’t think much of the new regime. She thought it might be time to stop working, go home to Prague, take up her real life again. She imagined herself in the future, a top international sci-entist, living in the States, handsome husband, a couple of kids, imagined looking through the photographs that recorded her stay in Scotland-the Castle, the Tattoo, hills and lochs. She might remove the photographs of her Scottish boyfriend so that her Amer-ican husband didn’t feel jealous. On the other hand, she might not.

“Come on,” her Scottish boyfriend moaned at her, tugging at her clothes. Sometimes when he was in the mood there was just no putting him off.

It was when he was pushing her pink uniform up around her hips that she felt something uncomfortable sticking into her back and said, “Hang on,” to him so that he groaned and rolled over on his back, his big pale Scottish penis sticking in the air like a flag-pole. She had nothing to compare it with, this being her first Celt, but she liked to imagine that this was what all Scotsmen were hiding under their kilts-even though the other maids shrieked with more knowledgeable laughter when she said this.

She found the source of her discomfort in one of the pockets of her jacket. The doll. One of the writer’s matryoshka. She had a vague memory of picking it up amid the horror of his house. It was a small one, although not the baby. She opened it, pulling it apart. Like an egg, there was a secret inside. She frowned at it.

“Sony Memory Stick,” her Scottish boyfriend said. “For a computer.”

“I know,” she said. Sometimes he forgot that she was a scientist from a sophisticated European capital city, sometimes he behaved as if she farmed potatoes back in the Middle Ages. The Memory Stick had a label on it. Death on the Black Isle.

“Greg upstairs has a Sony,” he said enthusiastically, his flagpole already limp and forgotten. He liked everything to do with comput-ers. “We can see what’s on it. It must be important if it was hidden.”

“I don’t think so,” Sophia said. “It’s just a novel.” But she was quite relieved when she heard him thundering up the stairs to Greg’s flat. At least now she could kick her shoes off and get a glass of wine. She remembered the writer’s house, how it was before the terrible thing happened in it. She could almost smell the roses in his hallway.

56

The body washed up a second time at Cramond, as if the girl were determined to come back again and again to the same place until someone took notice of her. The pathologist at the scene thought she might have been strangled (“Postmortem lividity on the neck”), but they would have to wait for the postmortem to know anything more certain. Three days in the waters of the Forth surfing up and down the coastline hadn’t done her any favors. Not quite Ophelia, washed down the stream, garlanded with flowers.

Cramond was under the flight path for Edinburgh Airport, and Louise wondered what they looked like from the air, little spiders scurrying around with no purpose, or a well-drilled army of ants working together? From the single policeman who had responded to the call, the number of people had expanded exponentially in the course of an hour. Her team, her case. Her first murder. They had found Hatter’s car parked in the long-stay car park at Edinburgh Airport, Jackson had been right, the boot was swarming with DNA, hopefully they would find matches to their corpse. Sooner or later they would find Graham Hatter.

They took the body away in a police launch, but both the procurator fiscal and the pathologist elected to fly in the helicop-ter. Louise went on the boat with the body, like an honor guard. She touched the thick plastic of the body bag.

“Hello, Lena,” she whispered. She had been Jackson’s girl all this time, now she belonged to her. She dialed his number. There were all kinds of things she would have liked to say to him, but in the end, when he answered, all she said was, “We found her. We found your girl.”

57

When they landed at the airport in Geneva, they took a taxi straight to the bank.

Inside the cool interior, Tatiana spoke to a woman at a recep-tion desk. “This is Mrs. Gloria Hatter, she is here to withdraw funds.” Gloria supposed that people who worked in Swiss banks probably spoke English better than the English did. She could have sworn that Tatiana didn’t sound as Russian as she had before.

The receptionist picked up a phone and murmured something discreet and French into it, and within seconds they were ushered into the plush interior of a private room.

“Nice bank,”Tatiana said appreciatively.

Half an hour later they were outside again in the sunshine. It was that easy. Tatiana had instructed Gloria to arrange for the money to be handed over in the form of high-value bearer bonds. The bearer bonds seemed rather flimsy to Gloria, she would have preferred the weighty reality of cash. “Loot,” Tatiana said and laughed.

They went to an old, expensive grand cafe, and Gloria divided the bonds between them. “One for you, one for me,”she said. Tatiana tucked hers into her bra, and Gloria followed suit. Then Gloria turned her phone back on and listened to the messages on her voice mail. There was a message from the security company man wondering where she was and why her house was wrapped in crime-scene tape. There was a message from Emily, who seemed irritated by the imminence of the Second Coming. There was a message from the hospital. Gloria took a second phone out of her handbag and listened to the one message it contained, it was an announcement she had been expecting since Tuesday, and it confirmed the message from the hospital.

It was a momentous and final thing.

“Graham’s dead,” she said, but she was speaking to herself. Tatiana had gone.

Gloria took her time over her coffee. She had a very nice slice of Eglantine torte with it, and when she paid she left a very good tip. She remembered that it was Friday, Beryl’s day, and wondered if her ancient mother-in-law would notice that she wasn’t there.

Out in the street she pushed the second phone deep into the first waste bin she came to. She was sure it would be emptied soon, the Swiss being so famous for their cleanliness. What she had seen of the country so far was very appealing. She imagined buying a little dark-wood chalet in the countryside, window boxes full of trailing geraniums in the summer, crisp white snow piled on the roof in winter. A basket of kittens sleeping by a log- burning stove.

There was so much work to be done. She would move through the world righting wrong. Legions of kittens, horses, budgies, mangled boys, murdered girls, they were all calling to her. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

She would be feared by the bad. She would be a legend in her own lifetime. She would be cosmic justice. That should definitely be said with capital letters. Cosmic Justice. Incontrovertibly and without argument, Cosmic Justice was a Good Thing.