One Good Turn

She answered Graham’s mobile and heard an urgent voice saying, “Graham, it’s me, Maggie. Where are you? I’ve been ringing you all afternoon.”

“Maggie Louden,” Gloria murmured to herself, trying to conjure up a mental picture of her. She was a new member of Graham’s sales force, a thin-faced woman in her late forties, with a helmet of dyed black hair, lacquered to her head like a beetle’s shell. The last time Gloria had seen her was at Christmas. Once a year, everyone-from judges and chief constables to brick suppliers and roofing contractors, as well as the more privileged members of the Hatter Homes’ office staff-was invited to drink champagne and eat mince pies under the Hatter roof at the Grange. She remembered Maggie clattering like a cockroach across the tiles in the hall in her badly fitting Kurt Geiger heels. Gloria didn’t remember any member of the sales force being invited to their Christmas party before.

Gloria was on the point of answering, of saying, “Hello, Maggie, it’s Gloria here,” when Maggie said, “Graham, darling, are you there?”

Darling? Gloria frowned. She remembered Graham standing in front of the Christmas tree with Maggie Louden, Murdo Miller, and Alistair Crichton, one hand round a glass of malt, the other placed blatantly on Maggie’s back at the tidemark where the black crepe of her cocktail dress met the white crepe of her skin. One of the waitresses employed for the evening offered them a plate of mince pies, and Graham had taken two, managing to get them both in his mouth at the same time. Maggie Louden had waved them away as if they were radioactive. Gloria felt suspicious of people who had no time for sugar, it was a personality flaw, like preferring weak tea. Tea and sugar were a test of character. She should have known then.

Graham had leaned toward Maggie, his jowly jaw almost brushing the shellac of her hair as he murmured something in her ear. It had seemed unlikely to Gloria that he was commenting on the new tree lights that she’d recently bought from Dobbies, but she had thought he was just being Graham. She often thought that if he’d been a binman or a newsagent he might not have been so attractive to women. If he hadn’t possessed money and power and charisma, he would-let’s face it-have been just an old man.

The phone felt suddenly hot in her hand. “Is it done yet, is it over?” Maggie asked. “Have you got rid of Gloria? Have you got rid of the old bag?”

Gloria almost dropped the phone in surprise. Graham was planning to divorce her? Graham was having an affair with one of his sales team, and the pair of them were talking about getting rid of her? Gloria slipped the phone back in Graham’s pocket and left Maggie Louden speaking to his summer-weight wool. She could still hear her muffled voice-“Graham? Are you there, Graham?”- like a persistent clairvoyant at a seance. In the distance Gloria heard the soft explosion of the firework that signaled the end of the Tattoo. Had capitalism really saved mankind? It seemed unlikely, but it looked like it might be too late to argue with Graham about it now.

15

He had let her go. He had heard Marlee’s voice in his ear saying, “Daddy,” quietly as if she were treading water next to him, and he had relinquished his dead mermaid and kicked for shore. Helping hands had hooked him out of the harbor and taken him into the Cramond Inn, where a malt whiskey and a bowl of hot soup had brought him back to life. By the time the police arrived, he was wrapped in blankets and his clothes were being washed and dried in industrial machines somewhere in the recesses of the building.

Then he had begun the seemingly never-ending process of telling and retelling his story to a succession of people. “Have you been drinking, sir?” the first uniformed constable on the scene asked him, looking pointedly at the glass in his hand that had just been refilled. Jackson would have considered hitting him if he could have summoned up the energy. Another reluctant part of him acknowledged that the guy was just doing his job.

The final person to arrive (“This is actually my day off,” he heard her say to someone) was a detective, a woman, with more attitude than manners. She gave him her card, which had printed on it DETECTIVE SERGEANT LOUISE MONROE, the “Sergeant” crossed out in Biro and replaced with a handwritten “Inspector.” He thought that was quite funny. A newly minted inspector. He hoped she didn’t have anything to prove. She also asked if he had been drinking.

“Yes, I have been drinking,” he said, showing her the now half-empty glass. “So would you under the circumstances.”

“Don’t make assumptions,” she said sharply. She was pretty, sort of. Her mouth was a little too big for her face and her nose a little too small and she had a crooked front tooth, but she was still pretty. Sort of. Late thirties, dark hair, dark eyes, Jackson had never had much luck with blondes. Her hair was in a bob, neat and practical, and she tucked it behind her ears every so often in a gesture that Jackson always found appealing. In women, anyway. It was a remote and far-flung outpost of his brain that was making this appraisal. For the most part he was just trying to stop himself from falling asleep from exhaustion.

She liked asking questions. What was he doing on Cramond Is-land, had he realized the tide was coming in when he set out, how had he got here?

“Bus,” he said reluctantly. He felt as if he were owning up to being a lower life-form. He was naked beneath the blankets, and he felt absurdly vulnerable. A naked man who took buses and had nothing better to do with his time than lurk around suspiciously on deserted islands. With the tide coming in. How stupid was he? Very, obviously.

What was he doing in Edinburgh? He shrugged and said he was here for the Festival. She gave him a skeptical look that made him feel as if he were lying, he obviously didn’t look the Festival type. He thought about saying, “My girlfriend’s in a play, she’s an actress,” but really that was nobody’s business but his own, and “girl-friend” sounded stupid, girlfriends were what young guys had. Jackson tried to think what he would have been doing if he’d been in charge of the investigation, would he be as suspicious of his own credentials as Louise Monroe was or would he already have divers out on police launches, uniforms combing the coastline?

“Most people are upset when they find a dead body,” Louise Monroe remarked. “ ‘Shock’ and ‘horror’ are the usual reactions, yet you seem remarkably phlegmatic, Mr. Brodie. Have you seen a dead body before?” What did she think-that he’d mistaken a seal for a woman, a lump of driftwood for a body?

“Yes,” he said, weariness finally making him snap, “I’ve seen hundreds of dead bodies. I know exactly what a dead body looks like, I know what a body looks like when it’s been blown up, burned, hung, drowned, shot, stabbed, beaten to death, and hacked to pieces. I know what people look like when they’ve stood in front of a train going at a hundred miles an hour, when they’ve been decomposing inside a flat for the whole of a summer, and when they’re three months old and they’ve died in their sleep for no apparent reason. I know what a dead body looks like, okay?”

The butch DC accompanying Louise Monroe looked as if she were getting ready to handcuff him, but Louise Monroe nodded and said, “Okay,” and he liked her for that. “Police?” she said, and he said, “Ex. Military and civil- Cambridge.” Name, rank, and number, tell the enemy nothing else.

Somewhere back at Force Command, she told him, someone must have decided there was a chance the woman was still alive, and the coastguard had sent out an RNLI launch as well as alerted an RAF helicopter. “So you can stop fretting, Mr Brodie.” “Fretting” wasn’t exactly the word he would have used himself.

“It’s pointless,” he said, “she was dead.” Every time he said it, she seemed to slip farther away.

“Has anyone reported a girl missing?” he asked. There were always girls missing, always had been, always would be. There were no women or girls reported missing who fitted the description he had given, Louise Monroe said.

“Well, she probably hasn’t been reported yet,” Jackson said. “She hadn’t been in the water long. And sometimes it takes a while for people to realize that someone isn’t where they should be. And sometimes people are never missed. Not everyone has someone who’ll notice they’ve gone.” Who would miss him? Julia, Marlee, that was it. Without Julia there would be just Marlee.

“Have you got the egg with you? In your pocket, maybe?” she said.

Jackson frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I just wondered if you had it with you-the egg you’re going to teach me to suck.” She was a spiky little thing. Not that little, taller than Julia, but then everyone was taller than Julia.