One Good Turn

“No, I need a word with Jim-DS Tucker.”

The dead girl looked unhealthy, more unhealthy than just straightforward dead. Ackroyd hefted her heart in his hand. An assistant, a girl named Heather, if Louise remembered correctly, hovered nearby, holding a metal pan like a baseball mitt, as if the pathologist might be about to toss the organ in her direction. When it was placed, rather than thrown, on the dish, Heather took the heart away and weighed it as if she were intending to bake a cake with it.

Louise reached out and touched the back of her hand against the nerveless one of the girl. Warm flesh against cold clay. The quick and the dead. She had a sudden memory of her mother at the undertaker’s, her face like cold, melted candle wax-the Wicked Witch of the West. Jim Tucker raised an inquiring eyebrow in her direction, and she gestured him to one side.

The dead woman’s clothing was on a nearby bench, waiting to be bagged and taken to forensics at Howdenhall. The bra and pants weren’t a matching set, but they both displayed Matalan labels. This was why you should wear matching underwear, Louise reminded herself, not for the off chance of a sexual encounter but for eventualities like this. The dead-on-a-fishmonger’s-slab sce-nario where the whole world could see that you bought your oddly matched underwear in cheap shops.

“Working girl, found in a doorway on Coburg Street. Drug overdose. Vice knew her,” Jim Tucker said. He dropped his voice. “What happened?”

“Crichton threw the case out on a technicality. Nonappearance of a witness.”

“You’re joking? He could have held off, asked us to find the witness.”

“We’ll go to appeal,” Louise said. “It’ll be fine.”

“Shit.”

“I know.” Something caught her eye, on the bench with the clothing-a little pile of business cards sitting on a petri dish. “What are these?”

“Found in her pocket,” Jim Tucker said. “The lady’s calling cards.”

Pale pink, black lettering. FAVORS. A mobile number. Just like Jackson Brodie had said.

“We thought maybe a call-girl agency,” Jim Tucker said. “We’ve not been able to get anything from the phone number.”

“She’s got a call girl’s calling card but you think she’s a street girl?” Louise puzzled.

“She was a druggie, I’m guessing it didn’t really matter to her whether she was in a hotel room or a doorway.”

Louise didn’t think that was true for a minute. If she was selling herself, she’d rather be doing it in a nice, warm hotel room, knowing someone knew where she was. “I’ve been looking for Favors myself, we’ve come up with nothing so far.”

“Something I should know about?” Jim Tucker asked.

“Not really. A missing girl, but I’m not convinced she existed in the first place.”

“Ah, your so-called dead body yesterday. I heard you called out all the troops for nothing. She hasn’t turned up?”

“Not yet.”

“What was that I heard about a body in Merchiston?”Ackroyd shouted across to her.

“No idea,” she said. “That’s Edinburgh South, nothing to do with me.”

“I live in Merchiston,”Ackroyd grumbled.

“There goes the neighborhood, Tom.” Neil Snedden laughed. He winked at Louise. Louise wondered if she could have sex with someone who was so twinkly in the face of death. She supposed it would depend how good- looking he was. Snedden wasn’t remotely good-looking.

Ackroyd took out a small electric saw and began to slice the top of the girl’s head off as if it were a boiled egg. “Look closely,” he said to a green Jim Tucker, “this is the only time you ever really get to see what’s inside a woman’s head.”

The sight of Jackson Brodie walking out of the Sheriff Court this morning had given her a start. That little flip-flap to the telltale heart.

Louise wondered what Jackson Brodie had been like when he was fourteen. Did he have all his virtues (and drawbacks) in place by then, could you have looked at the boy and seen the man in him? Could you look at the man and see the boy?

The pink cards existed. Louise had the proof in her pocket, the top one swiped from the pile while everyone was looking at Ackroyd performing his party piece. Okay, so it was tampering with evidence, but it wasn’t as if it were the only card. At the end of the day, what did it matter if there was one less? Really?

She phoned Jeff Lennon, he was the guy at the station who knew everything. A DS a few weeks away from retirement, the face of a tortoise, the memory of an elephant. Handicapped by a bad knee, he was seeing out his last days doing a reluctant catch-up on paperwork, and she knew he would be glad of an excuse to do something else.

“Do me a favor?” she asked him.

“If you ask nicely.”

“Nicely. Can you find out about a road-rage incident in the Old Town yesterday? The attacker drove off, can you check that someone caught the registration?” Jackson said there were “dozens of other witnesses,” but when Jeff phoned back a few minutes later, it was to report that no one had remembered, although “someone thought the car was blue.”

“Well, I’m the bearer of good news,” she said. “Blue is correct, and what’s more it was a Honda Civic, and I can give you a reg-istration, I’ve got a witness.” She had called him “Jackson” to his face. It had felt unprofessional, even though it wasn’t.

“Jeff? One more wee favor? Get me an address for a Terence Smith, in court this morning.”

Jim Tucker had a dead girl carrying around with her a card for Fa-vors. Jackson Brodie had a dead girl carrying around with her a card for Favors. Jim’s girl was definitely a prostitute of some ilk, therefore there was a good chance that Jackson’s girl was too. She realized that she was thinking about Jim Tucker and Jackson Brodie as if they were equals. Write out ten times, Jackson Brodie is not a detective. He was a witness. A possible suspect as well, even if the charge was only wasting police time. And he was certified guilty of assault, even if he claimed he was innocent. Let’s just say it again, Louise-he was a witness, a suspect, and a convicted felon.

24

There was nothing like a night in the cells to give you an appetite. Jackson was starving, but raking round the cupboards of the tiny kitchen, he could find only dried-up instant gravy granules and some perforated tea bags that smelled herbal and repellent. That was something useful he could do today, find a supermarket or, preferably, a good deli, stock up on decent stuff, and cook something for them to eat tonight, something wholesome. Jackson’s culinary repertoire consisted of five dishes that he could cook well, which were five more than Julia could cook.

He imagined how his local market in France would look this morning, overflowing with tomatoes, basil, cheeses, figs, and big, fat French peaches, ripe enough to burst. No wonder northerners were miserable buggers, evolving for thousands of years on har-vests of wet grains and thin gruels.

Julia hadn’t looked as though she’d eaten at all yesterday, she’d had a “drink” with Richard Mott at lunchtime. Still, having seen him, Jackson now felt relatively safe from any rivalry with him, no way would Julia be attracted to anyone that untalented. The guy had died onstage.

Propped up against the kettle was a note from Julia. Her bold hand announced simply, See you later, love J. Her initial was accompanied by only one kiss and no exclamation points, she was a person who used exclamation points liberally, she said they made everything seem more friendly. Jackson thought they made every-thing seem startling but found that he missed them when they weren’t there. He was being overanalytical, there wasn’t much you could read into See you later, love J. Was there? The absence of ex-clamation points, the paucity of Xs, the initial rather than a name, the vagaries of time and