One Good Turn

about every emo-tion he experienced. “Fucking Thatcher,” he said, shrugging it off in a masculine way, making it political, not personal, although in this case there was no difference.

And then they got a baby and a dishwasher, and Jackson con-tinued on and didn’t think again for a long time about the path he hadn’t chosen, a way of life that had never been, yet that didn’t stop him from aching for it in some confused place in his soul.

His target maid was at the sink too, wringing out a cloth and vig-orously wiping the draining board back and forth, back and forth. No crucifixion ears as far as he could see, although she had her back to him and was singing along to the radio in a foreign accent. There was so much background noise in the house that Jackson was unsure how to proceed without startling her. He was struck by three things: one-she wasn’t the peasanty one that the Housekeeper had barked at, and two-she had a great behind, made greater by the tight skirt of the pink uniform. “Two hard-boiled eggs in a handkerchief,” his brother used to say. His brother had been a connoisseur of women. One day, one day too soon, men would look at his daughter in the same way. And if he saw them looking at her like that, he would beat ten kinds of crap out of them.

Jackson had spent half his life in uniform without thinking much about it beyond that it made getting up in the morning eas-ier when you didn’t have to make a choice about what to wear, so the effect a woman in uniform could have always struck him as curious. Not all uniforms, obviously, not Nazis, dinner ladies, traffic wardens. He tried to recall if he had ever seen Julia in a uni-form, offhand he couldn’t really think of one that would suit her, she wasn’t really a uniform kind of girl. Louise Monroe’s black suit/white shirt combo was a kind of uniform. She had a little pulse that beat in her throat. It made her look more vulnerable than she probably was.

He never really got the third thought to the front of his brain because the woman in this particular uniform caught sight of him at that moment and reached into the dishwasher, plucked a big dinner plate from the rack, and in one smooth action sliced it through the air as if it were a Frisbee, aiming straight for his head. Jackson ducked and the plate crashed through the open kitchen doorway into the hall. He put his hands in the air before she reached for another plate. “You don’t take any prisoners, do you?” he said.

“University discus champion,” she said without any apparent remorse for having nearly decapitated him. “Why are you creeping?”

“I’m not creeping, I was looking for someone to clean my flat,” Jackson said, trying to sound like a helpless male (“Shouldn’t be too hard,” he heard Josie’s voice say in his head). “I saw the van and…”

“We’re not called cleaners. We’re called maids.” She relented a little. “I’m sorry, I’m nervous.” She sat down at the table and pushed her hands through her hair, her hands were red and raw with some kind of dermatitis. She said, “This morning, Sophia, a maid, a friend, found a man who was murdered in a house we go to. Was terrible,” the foreign girl said mournfully.

“I’m sure it was,” Jackson said.

“We’re not paid enough for that.”

Money. Always a good starting point, in Jackson’s experience. He removed five twenty-pound notes from his wallet and placed them on the table. “What’s your name?” he said to the girl.

“Marijut.”

“Okay, Marijut,” Jackson said, flicking the switch on the elec-tric kettle, “how about a nice cup of tea?”

“A young woman,” Jackson repeated patiently, “I want to know if she’s on your books.”There was a listless air in the offices of Fa-vors. The girl in charge, who seemed to be the only person in the building, spoke a poor kind of English and seemed to want will-fully to misunderstand everything Jackson said to her. He automatically converted to a kind of simplistic pidgin because deep in his atavistic native soul he believed that foreigners couldn’t be flu-ent in English, whereas, of course, it was the English who were incapable of speaking foreign languages. “Ears? Crosses?” he said loudly.

The office was in a neglected cobbled close off the Royal Mile.

The soot had long since been blasted off the face of Edinburgh, but the stonework in this place was still encrusted with the black reminder of the capital’s reeking past. It was a cold, unloved place, strangely untouched by the hand of either the Enlightenment or the property developer.

Favors was squeezed in between a restaurant (a self-styled “bistro”) and Fringe Venue 87. Jackson peered into the dim and meaty interior of the bistro, where the last few lunch customers still lingered. He made a mental note never to eat there. From the outside, the Fringe venue looked like a sauna, but it proved to be housing a disgruntled group of American high school children playing The Caucasian Chalk Circle to an audience of two men who looked as if they might have also mistaken the venue for a sauna. Julia had warned him about Edinburgh “saunas.” “Don’t for one minute imagine that they are actually saunas, Jackson.”

The office had an unremarkable black-painted street door on whose jamb was fixed a cheap plastic nameplate that read FA-VORS-IMPORT AND EXPORT. No exclamatory promise to fulfill his desires, he noticed. “Import” and “export”-if ever there were two words that covered a multitude of sins, these were they. There was a security camera above the buzzer so that it was impossible to stand at the door without being scrutinized. He put on his most trustworthy face and got in by posing as a courier. No one ever seemed to ask couriers for their IDs.

He had to go up a stair and along a corridor that was stacked with industrial-size containers of cleaning fluids. HAZARDOUS MA-TERIALS, one of them said. Another sported a black skull and crossbones, but the writing on the container was in a language that Jackson didn’t recognize. He thought about Marijut, wringing the cloth out, cleaning the draining board with her washerwoman hands. If nothing else, he could report Favors to Environmental Health. Another wall of boxes was stenciled with one mysterious word: MATRYOSHKA.

Perhaps Favors was some kind of crime cartel that was running everything in the city. And what was it with the crucifixes? A Vatican-run crime cartel?

“This woman had crucifixes in her ears,” Jackson said to the receptionist. “Crosses.” He took a pen from her desk and drew a crucifix on a pad of paper and pointed at his ears. “Earrings,” he said, like yours, he pointed toward the silver hoops in the recep-tionist’s ears. She looked at him as if he were mad. Marijut had told him that she didn’t recall seeing any girl with crucifix earrings. His description, “Five six, hundred twenty pounds, blond hair,” could easily have fitted half the girls she knew. “Me, for ex-ample,” she said. Or the receptionist.

Jackson tapped the computer monitor and said, “Let’s look in here.”The girl gave him a surly glare and then scrolled idly down the screen.

“What do you want her for?” the girl asked.

“I don’t want her for anything. I want to know if she’s on your books.” Jackson craned his neck to catch a glimpse of the screen. The girl opened a file that looked like a CV, there was a thumb- nail photograph in the top left-hand corner, but she closed it down immediately. “Stop,” he said. “Go back, go back to that last one.” It was her, he could swear it was her. His dead girl.

“She doesn’t work for us anymore,” the receptionist said. She gave a little hiccup of laughter as if she were making a joke. “Her contract is terminated.” She clicked the files shut with an air of fi-nality and turned off the screen.

“This woman I’m looking for,” he enunciated each word slowly and clearly, “this woman is dead.” Jackson made a slashing move-ment across his throat. The girl shrank away from him. He wasn’t very good at miming. He could have done with Julia’s help, no one played charades with as much enthusiasm as Julia, except per-haps for Marlee. How did you portray dead? He crossed his arms over his chest and closed his eyes. When he opened them, the Housekeeper was standing in front of him, regarding him quizzically. “He says he’s courier,” the girl at the computer said sarcastically. “Does he?” the Housekeeper said. “I’m looking for someone,” Jackson said stoutly, “a girl who’s gone missing.” “What’s her name?” the Housekeeper asked. “I don’t know.” “You’re looking for someone and you don’t know who she is?” “I can give you someone else,” the girl at the computer screen offered. “I don’t want someone else,” Jackson said. “What kind of agency are you?”

The girl leaned closer to him over the desk and, giving Jackson a predatory kind of smile, said, “What kind of agency would you like us to be?”

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