One Good Turn

a gun-the Welrod, in fact-to their mother’s head. “What do you say, boys,” his father said, pressing the barrel harder against his wife’s temple, “shall I shoot her?” He was drunk, of course. Martin couldn’t remember what he had said or done, he was only eight at the time and he seemed to have blocked out the rest of the “incident.” He hoped he had stood up for his mother, although God knows there were enough times when she didn’t stand up for him. He always expected that, in the end, his father would blow his own brains out and was surprised by the tameness of his exit.

There was no way he could look at a gun these days and think it was a good thing. He touched it, noticed the slight tremor in his hand. He stroked the metallic smoothness, he’d expected it to be cold but it was almost the temperature of his hand. The Welrod, beloved of special forces everywhere, developed in Britain during the war.The only truly silenced gun. Nine-millimeter, single shot. Not a great range, best close-up. There was only one thing really that you would use a Welrod for, and that was shooting a single target at close range as covertly as possible. In other words, it was an assassin’s gun.

He took a deep breath. He was going to walk out of the bathroom, out of the hotel room, quietly, it was obviously very important not to wake Paul Bradley. He was going to tiptoe down the stairs, past reception, and out of the building, then he would jump in the first taxi he found and ask to be taken to the nearest police station.

He opened the bathroom door. Paul Bradley was sleeping soundly, snoring gently, his arms flung out innocently, like a child’s. Martin began to cross the room toward the door, but his legs started to melt. When he looked down, the carpet was swimming in front of his eyes. A spasm of dizziness seemed to pass through his brain. He was suddenly extraordinarily tired, he had never been this tired in his life, he hadn’t known it was possible to be this tired. He had to lie down and sleep for a little while, right here on this unpleasant tartan carpet.

14

Gloria made sure all the doors and windows were locked, set the burglar alarm, and then went down to the basement to check the security cameras.

All quiet on the garden front, except for a vixen trotting briskly across the lawn. Gloria put out food for the foxes most nights, she’d started by just giving them leftovers, but now she often bought them food specially, packets of pork sausages, a little piece of stewing steak. For the hedgehog (there may have been more than one, but how could you tell?) she put out cat food and bread and milk. The fox ate that as well, of course. Sometimes rabbits romped on the lawn (the fox ate them too), and Gloria had seen countless neighborhood cats, as well as the small, shy rodents that only came out at night. The fox particularly liked the small, shy rodents. Sometimes, down in the basement, it was like watching a nature program on television.

The night-vision cameras showed everything in strange greens and grays so that it seemed like a different garden altogether, a shadowy place seen through ghostly eyes. Something moved in the chaos of leaves that formed the big rhododendron bushes along the drive. Something glinting, diamonds set in jet. Eyes. Gloria tried to think what animal could be that tall. A bear? A horse? Both unlikely. She blinked and it was gone. A creature of the night.

For all their technology, the cameras couldn’t go out there and snuffle among the leaves, couldn’t howl and bark at an intruder. If Graham died, the first thing Gloria would do would be to go to the dogs’ home at Seafield and bring home a soft-eyed lurcher or a springy little terrier. Graham didn’t like animals, there had never been a pet in the house because he claimed to have a serious allergy to fur and feathers. Gloria had never witnessed any manifestation of this or any other allergy in Graham. Once, she had taken some fur from a neighbor’s cat-the poor thing had some kind of alopecia, so all you had to do was stroke it and you came away with a handful of its coat- and she had placed the fur beneath Graham’s pillow and stayed awake half the night watching him to see what happened, but he woke in the morning just the same as usual, fancying “a couple of poached eggs.” Gloria suspected her children would have turned out to be nicer people if they had been brought up with a dog.

She thought of Graham occupying the limbo of the ICU, a dim no-man’s-land between life and death, waiting for the Great Architect in the Sky to reveal his plans. Gloria was hugging to herself the secret of this occurrence, preparing herself for the consequences of it. She hadn’t phoned either Ewan or Emily to tell them that their father was hanging around at death’s door, waiting to see if it was going to open for him. She hadn’t, in fact, told anyone. She knew she was supposed to tell people, she just couldn’t be bothered somehow. They would make such a drama of it, and it seemed to Gloria that it was a thing that went off better if you were quiet about it. And anyway, there were things to do before he died, before people knew. So she would just leave him there in his hospital bed, hidden in plain sight, while she got on with preparing for widowhood. His sudden pitch toward mortality had taken her by surprise. Graham didn’t often catch her on the hop like that.

Gloria climbed into bed with a mug of Horlicks, a plate of oat-cakes with Wensleydale cheese, and a fat Maeve Binchy. She always ate Wensleydale, never Lancashire, her sense of county loyalty was bred in the bone. It was in the same spirit of observance that she watched Emmerdale rather than Coronation Street, simply because Emmerdale was set in Yorkshire, although not, it was true, any part of Yorkshire that she recognized.

How vast and wonderful the marital bed seemed, now that it was completely absent of Graham-she had already washed all the sheets, turned and aired the mattress, hoovered out his dead skin from the pillows. As soon as she was settled nicely, Sod’s Law, she heard the patient ringing of the phone. Gloria, who thought Alexander Graham Bell had a lot to answer for, had refused to install a phone by the bed. She failed to see the need. When she was in bed she wanted to sleep, not talk. Graham’s mobile was surgically attached to his ear, so he didn’t need a phone in the bedroom, and there was a panic button by the bed “for emergencies,” although Gloria hesitated to imagine what kind of emergency might take place in the bedroom that would require her to hit a panic button. Graham wanting sex, maybe. She hauled herself reluctantly out of bed and went downstairs. It would be best, she supposed, to head off any queries at the pass.

The caller ID proclaimed Pam. Gloria sighed and picked up the receiver, but it wasn’t Pam, it was her husband, Murdo. “Gloria! Sorry to bother you so late, I’ve been trying to raise Graham on his mobile.” She could hear him trying to sound amiable, but Murdo was not an amiable man and the strain of pretending to be one made him sound mildly delirious. “We were supposed to be having a meeting this afternoon, but he didn’t turn up. Is he there? Is he in his bed?”

“No, he’s in Thurso.”

The word seemed to send Murdo into a hysterical spin. “Thurso? You’re joking. What do you mean, Thurso? What’s he doing in Thurso, for fuck’s sake, Gloria?”

Why had she chosen Thurso? Perhaps because it rhymed with “Murdo.” Or because it was the furthest place she could think of. “He’s building an estate up there.”

“Since when?”

“Since now.”

“That doesn’t explain why he’s not answering his phone.”

“He forgot it,” Gloria said stoutly.

“Graham forgot his phone?”

“I know, it’s hard to believe, but there you go. Astonishing things happen all the time.” (It was true, they did.)

Murdo made an agitated kind of noise, frustration and panic in equal measures. Fortunately, Graham’s mobile began to ring at that moment somewhere in the further depths of the house, identified by its irritating “Ride of the Valkyries”ringtone. Gloria followed the thread of Wagner through the house, like a rat following the pied piper, until eventually she ended up in the utility room, where she had placed the plastic bag of Graham’s belongings that she had brought back from the hospital. He would have been very annoyed to know that his bespoke summer- weight wool suit and his handmade shoes were stuffed in a hospital rubbish bag.

Delving into the bag, she finally recovered the phone from the inside pocket of Graham’s jacket and held it up so that Murdo could hear it ringing.

“Hear that?” she said. “ ‘Ride of the Valkyries.’ I told you he forgot it.” Murdo made some kind of snorting noise and rang off. “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Gloria said. Some people had no manners.