One Good Turn

“Who’s on the Merchiston murder?” she asked.

“Robert Campbell, Colin Sutherland,” Jessica said promptly. “High-profile celebrity murder gets the big fish high up the food chain.”

“Celebrity?”

“Richard Mott,” Sandy Mathieson said dismissively, “eighties comedian. Did you hear what happened?”

“No, what?” Louise said. The name sounded vaguely familiar.

“They ID’d the wrong person,” Jessica said.

“You’re kidding.”

Sandy laughed. “Apparently he lived with this other guy, a writer, wasn’t it?” He checked with Jessica (Christ, they were like a double-act), who nodded and took up the story. “And he was wearing his boyfriend’s watch,” she said.

“Who was?” Louise was totally confused.

“Richard Mott,” Jessica said with theatrical patience, “was wearing the other guy’s watch. His boyfriend. And the boyfriend- get this-is a crime writer.”

“Life imitating art,” Sandy said as if he’d just invented the phrase. “Alex Blake. Ever heard of him?”

“No,” Louise said. “They ID’d him by his watch?”

“Well, his face was gone, apparently,” Jessica said in the offhand way you might say, “Do you want vinegar on your chips?” Louise could have eaten a horse, she’d had nothing since breakfast. “Have you got anything to eat?” she said to Jessica.

“Sorry, boss.” Cheeky cow. Louise didn’t believe her, you didn’t get that fat without having constant access to food. Louise supposed she should have warm and fuzzy feelings toward the sisterhood, they were only 25 percent of the force, they should support one another, yada, yada, but quite honestly she’d like to corner Jessica and give her a few vicious playground pinches.

There was a constant undertow of communication on the po-lice radio. A lot of shoplifting. What would happen if Archie’s foray into thieving hadn’t been a one-off? What would she do if he was caught next time? Louise checked her watch, he should be home from school by now.

Sandy turned to her and asked unexpectedly, parent to parent, “How’s that lad of yours doing?”

“Fine,” Louise said. “Archie’s doing fine. Great,” she added, trying to introduce a more upbeat note, “he’s doing great.” Sandy had a boy, but he was only six or seven years old, still harmless.

She climbed out of the car, waving her mobile at Sandy and Jessica in a shorthand that said only too plainly, “I’m going to make a call that I don’t want you to hear.” She wondered what they said about her when she wasn’t there. She didn’t really care as long as they thought she was good at her job.

She walked out onto the causeway, only one bar of signal on her phone. Jackson Brodie said he couldn’t get a signal at all, that was why he hadn’t phoned the police from the island.

She walked back and caught a signal. Her answering machine clicked in after a couple of rings, and she listened to an assertive male voice informing her that no one was available to answer the phone just now, so “leave a message.” Nice and neutral, no “please” or “thank-you” (I’m a polite woman asking to be offended), no “sorry, there’s no one at home” (open invitation to burglars), no promise that anyone would actually return the call. The male voice belonged to a friend’s husband, drafted in to record the message after Louise had been plagued by nuisance calls, even though she was unlisted. Some guys just dialed every number until a woman answered. There were thousands of them out there, seeing out the wee small hours by dialing the Samari-tans and ChildLine and unsuspecting women. Wankers, in every sense of the word. She had an uncomfortable feeling that the per-petrator of the nuisance calls was Archie’s friend Hamish.

“If you’re there, Archie, can you pick up?” When hell froze over. Louise didn’t know why she was bothering, he never an-swered the phone unless he thought it was one of his friends. She tried his mobile, but it went straight to his answering machine. If she could, she would have a tracking device implanted in his scruff.

Finally she gave in and, using the only lingua franca understood by fourteen-year-old boys, texted him, “Are u home? Eat something from the freezer. I may be late. Love Mum x.” It was odd to give her-self that appellation, to commit it to writing, she never thought of herself as “Mum.” Maybe that was where she’d gone wrong. Had she gone wrong? Probably.

Archie could just about manage to take a pizza or a burger from the freezer and put it in the microwave.There was no point in trying to get him to do anything more challenging (“An omelet, surely you can manage an omelet?”).

Her phone rang, not Archie but Jim Tucker. “My girl died of a heroin overdose,” he said without preamble. “No identity yet. The forensic dentist said her mouth was, and I quote, ‘full of crap,’ by which he meant foreign fillings, Eastern European, by the look of it.”

“No dental records, then,” Louise said.

“No, and I don’t know if it’s likely, but someone said that they thought Favors were cleaners.”

“Cleaners?”

As soon as she’d said good-bye to Jim Tucker, her phone rang again. “I’ve been trying to phone you,”Archie complained.

“I try to phone you all the time and you never answer.”

“Can Hamish stay over tonight?”

“It’s a school night.”

“We’ve got a geography project we have to do together.”

“What project?”A short, muffled conversation ensued, Hamish tutoring Archie, no doubt, before he came back on the line and said smugly, “Discuss the transport factors influencing the location of industry.”

It was plausible, Hamish was good. “Does his mother say he can?”

“Of course.”

“Okay.”

“And can we get a takeaway?”

“Okay. Do you have money?”

“Yes.”

“Will you remember to feed the cat?”

“Whatever.”

“That’s not the answer I’m looking for.”

“Yessss. Okay? Jesus.”

Louise sighed, she really, really wanted a drink. A lime daiquiri. Cold enough to freeze her brain. And then she’d like to have a lot of sex. Casual, mindless, faceless, emotion-free sex. You would think casual sex would be easy, but no. She’d hardly had any since Archie hit adolescence. You couldn’t just bring a guy home and shag him while your teenage son was playing Grand Theft Auto on the other side of a wafer-thin plasterboard wall. Every year there was a fresh surprise, something you didn’t know about having a kid. Maybe it went on like that forever, maybe when Archie was sixty and Louise was in her eighties, she’d be thinking, “Well, I didn’t realize sixty-year-old men did that.”

She watched a uniformed PC tap on Jessica’s window and hand her something.

“What did the UB want?” she asked, climbing back in the car.

“Brought this,” Jessica said, handing her a copy of the Evening News, helpfully turned to an inside page where she pointed out the small headline POLICE ASK PUBLIC FOR HELP WITH THEIR INQUIRIES.

“It’s not very obvious, is it?” Sandy said. “‘Police are asking if any-one saw a woman go into the water’-‘go into the water’? That’s very vague.”

“Well, it is very vague,” Louise said. “She was found in the water and somehow or other she got into it.”

“If she exists,” Jessica said. She sneezed, and Sandy said, “Hope you’re not getting the ‘flu.’ ” Louise didn’t care if Jessica got the “flu.”

Louise felt suddenly incredibly tired. “Bugger this for a game of soldiers. They’re putting out something on Radio Forth tomorrow, but in reality that’s it for now. If there’s a body out there, then it’ll probably wash up eventually. I don’t see what more we can do.”