One Good Turn

good ankles, “turned on a lathe,” his brother would have said. Jackson was a bit of an ankle man. He liked all the other bits that went into the making of a woman, but he particularly appreciated a good pair of ankles. It was the bad Jackson, obviously, who was thinking about Louise Monroe’s an-kles, the evil doppelg?er who lay in ambush within his brain. Good Jackson, Bad Jackson. The pair of them seemed to be having quite a tussle these days. Jackson didn’t like to think what would happen if Bad Jackson won. Had Dr. Jekyll won over Mr. Hyde? Which one was good and which one was bad? He had no idea, he’d never read the book, only seen that Mary Reilly movie, half of it anyway, on video-Josie’s choice-before falling into a postpizza sleep on the sofa.

“I didn’t kill the dog,” Jackson said. “It just died. Dogs do die of natural causes, despite what everyone thinks. I take it you haven’t found her, then? The dead girl?”

“No, sorry.”

“Not yet” would have been a better answer. She said “sorry” as if looking for the dead girl had been a personal favor to him rather than a police case. Jackson suddenly caught sight of Terence Smith leaving the Sheriff Court, a phone glued to his ear. “Hey, you,” Jackson shouted, starting after him. Louise Monroe caught his sleeve and held him back, saying, “Easy, tiger, you don’t want to end up straight back in court.” Terence Smith gave him a two-finger salute and stepped into a taxi.

“Lying bastard,” Jackson muttered.

“That’s what they all say.”

“So you pleaded guilty even though you were innocent?” Louise Monroe mused over a latte while Jackson downed a triple espresso like medicine. “You must be a Catholic.”

“My mother was Irish,” Jackson said. “She was very religious, I was a disappointment to her.” “I’m a Scottish Catholic, that’s a double whammy-all the same crap but a chip welded on the shoulder as well.” “And were you a disappointment to your mother?” Jackson asked.

“No. She was a disappointment to me.”

“It just seemed easier to plead guilty.”

“And that makes perfect sense where you come from, Mr. Brodie, in Topsy-Turvy Land?”

Mr. Brodie. That’s how Julia used to address him, in the early days, making his surname suggestive and intimate as if he were a character in a Regency romance. Now she said “Jackson” sharply, like someone who knew him too well.

“I just thought it would be quicker, rather than going to trial and having to come back, get a solicitor, all that rigmarole. I had no witnesses, the guy was injured, and I never mentioned my own injuries when I was charged.” He held out his hand for her to see, deciding against lifting his shirt and displaying his other purple trophies in the genteel environment of the museum. “My sword hand,” he said ruefully.

“He stamped on your hand?” she asked. “When you were on the ground? And you didn’t plead self-defense? You’re an idiot.”

“So I’m told.”

“You’re an ex-policeman, a man of previously good character, it’s your first offense.”

“I’ve crossed over to the dark side.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to know what it was like.”

“And?”

“Dark.” He sighed and winced at the pain in his ribs. He had enough of this conversation. “What about Favors?” he asked. “Find anything?”

“I put Jessica on to it yesterday. There’s no entry in the phone book for them-”

“Surprise, surprise.”

“Nothing at Companies House, no e-mail address, no Web site, and thousands of Internet hits for everything ranging from dog-walking to hard-core porn, although none that’s obviously Edinburgh-based. Vice say they’d never heard of a sauna called Fa-vors, ditto a lap-dancing club.”

“You should look for the pink cards-phone boxes, toilets, pubs, clubs.” Jackson began to feel something he hadn’t felt for a while, for a moment he couldn’t identify it, and then he realized what it was-he was working a case-all the excitement of trying to put something together, of trying to get somewhere. (“Let’s face it, Jackson,you feel unmanned.”) “Have you asked the girls on the street?”

She said, “I can see your police antennae waving. Put them away.”

She had bitten her lip so that it had bled, he could see a scar or a scab, indicating it was a habit. She looked so in control, yet the whole drawing-your-own-blood thing hinted at all kinds of inner neuroses. He thought of the snake eating its own tail, devouring itself. He wondered what she’d been doing at the Sheriff Court. He didn’t ask, instead he said, “The man who attacked me last night, Terence Smith, aka Honda Man, was involved in a road- rage incident yesterday. He was a maniac, completely out of con-trol. Viking berserkers come to mind.”

“You saw it? What are you, some kind of professional witness, traveling around looking for crime scenes?”

“No, I’m cursed.”

She laughed and said, “Who cursed you?” and he said, “I think I did it to myself.” Because he was an idiot obviously. She looked like a different person when she laughed.

“I saw him take a baseball bat to someone in the street, and a few hours later the guy has a go at me, threatening me, telling me to keep my mouth shut about what I saw. He knew my name. How could he know that?”

“So you were the only witness to this road rage?”

“No,” Jackson said, “there were dozens of other witnesses. He didn’t see me, and he had much more reason to go after the guy who stopped him-some guy threw a briefcase at him. Maybe he’s warned him off as well.”

“Or maybe he was just a run-of-the-mill mugger and you imagined him threatening you.”

“Imagined?”The way she’d been listening to him he’d thought she believed him. He felt suddenly let down.

“Look at the evidence,” she said. “You say you witnessed a road-rage incident, you claim the alleged perpetrator of the inci-dent then assaulted you-although you yourself pleaded guilty to assaulting him-you claim you found a dead body, but there is no evidence to support that claim. You’re a millionaire, but you’re hanging around finding trouble in all the wrong places. Let’s face it, Jackson, on paper you just don’t look good.”

The unexpected use of his first name took him more by surprise than the reference to his personal circumstances, but then of course she would have run a background check on him. She wasn’t the stupid one here, he was the one with the bruises and the crim-inal conviction. He said, “You’ve got blood on your lip.”

21

Martin was woken by the dawn chorus. Even with his brain furred by sleep, it struck him as unlikely, the Four Clans was the kind of place where no birds sang, and sure enough, after a while he realized it was actually his mobile rather than an avian choir.

He fumbled for his spectacles, knocking the phone to the floor as he did so. Even with his spectacles on, he felt as if his eyes had been smeared with Vaseline. By the time he had recovered it, the phone had ceased chirping. He peered at the screen-1 missed call. He went into the phone’s call registry. Richard Mott. Richard was probably wondering what had happened to him last night, although he wasn’t exactly the type who would care. He probably wanted the loan of something.

He put the phone down on the bedside table and found him-self looking at a woman being burned at the stake. Her mouth was open in a gulping howl of oval as the flames from the piles of wood surrounding her began to catch at her body. It was a print of a woodcut hanging on the wall. OLD EDINBURGH, a label beneath it declared. When they drained the Nor Loch to make Princes Street Gardens, they discovered it was not just the reposi-tory of the town’s sewage and refuse but also the final resting place of the town’s witches-their trussed-up skeletons tied