One Good Turn

daiquiri was the kind of drink you were supposed to sip. He avoided cocktails in case they arrived encumbered with parasols and sickly sweet cherries on sticks, but the daiquiri looked clean and inviting.

“Try it,” she said, holding the glass out to him, and he felt shocked by the sudden intimacy of the offer. He had been brought up in a parsimonious household where they tended to steal food off one an-other’s plates, not offer it up willingly. He could still see his brother, Francis, winking at him while he filched a sausage off his sister-and getting a box on the ear from Niamh for his efforts. Julia, on the other hand, would share with a dog, she was forever pushing forks and spoons into his mouth, “Try this, eat this,” licking her lips, sucking her fingers, he’d never met anyone before for whom the line between food and sex was so thin. The things she could do with a strawberry were enough to make a grown man blush. He had a sudden image of her in the Nell Gwyn costume, volunteering her breasts to the photographer, oranges are the only fruit. He had seen that on television, Julia had read the book, that was the difference between them. She had a little gap between her front teeth that gave her the slightest of lisps. It was funny-he’d always been aware of that, yet he’d never really thought about it before.

“No, you’re all right,” he said to Louise Monroe, lifting his glass to prove that he was happy with his own choice of alcohol, and she said, “I wasn’t offering to share DNA with you.”

“I didn’t think you were.”

The pub was on a street off the Royal Mile, close to the offices of Favors.

“I see you found the soot-blackened, whiskey-soaked, blood-sodden metaphysical core of the wen that was Edinburgh,” she said when she met him in the cobbled close.

“Right,” he said. She could be quite wordy once she got going. Like Julia. He had finally managed to get a call through to her, and all she could say was, “You should have phoned me before you came here. Oh, no, wait a minute, you’re not a policeman, are you? You shouldn’t have been here in the first place.”

“I couldn’t get ahold of you, you didn’t give me your mobile number.”

“Well, I’m here now, and what exactly am I looking for? I see a very dodgy-looking sauna and a doomed production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle.”

“Shit,”Jackson said, staring at the entrance. There was no longer any sign saying FAVORS-IMPORT AND EXPORT, no sign saying anything at all. No buzzer, no camera. The door was still there, Jackson was relieved to see, so he hadn’t entered some parallel uni-verse, and when Louise Monroe gave it a push, it opened with the theatrical kind of creak that a sound-effects man would have been proud of. They made their way up the stairs, if they had been Americans they would have had their guns out by now, Jackson thought, but as it was, being Scottish and half-Scottish, they had nothing to defend themselves with but their wits.

“First floor,” Jackson whispered.

“Why are you whispering?” Louise asked in a loud voice that echoed in the stairwell. “I thought you said they were a cleaning agency.”

“They are,” he said. “Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“No, they are, definitely,” Jackson said, “I mean I’ve seen them cleaning-scrubbing, hoovering, that sort of thing. They wear pink uniforms.” He had an image of Marijut’s buttocks moving rhythmically and immediately dismissed it. “It’s just there’s something… odd about them. I don’t know. A lot of industrial-cleaning firms take on ex-cons, you know, maybe there’s a link. The girls I saw on Morningside were definitely legit cleaners. I thought I saw the dead girl’s photograph on their database.”

The place was abandoned, no computer, no filing cabinet or desk, the Housekeeper and the receptionist had packed up and gone. The place felt as if it had never been occupied in the first place, the cheap contract carpeting, slightly tacky underfoot, the chipped paintwork and the unwashed windows, all bore no hint that a couple of hours previously there had been a business here. There was a smell of something stale and slightly rank.

“What database would that be, then?” Louise Monroe mur-mured, looking around the empty space. “The one on that invis-ible computer over there?”

“I don’t understand,” Jackson muttered. He spotted something on the carpet, a tiny painted wooden doll, no bigger than a peanut. He picked it up and peered at it, and Louise Monroe said, “You need spectacles, you shouldn’t be so vain.”

Jackson ignored the comment. “What is that?” he asked, holding the little doll up for her inspection.

“It’s from one of those Russian doll sets,” she said, “the ones that nest inside one another. Matri- something.”

“Matryoshka?”

“Yes.”

“This one doesn’t open,” Jackson said.

“That’s because it’s the last one. The baby.”

Jackson pocketed the doll. It was less than two hours since he was here, how could they have just packed up their tents and slipped away without leaving a trace behind? No, they had left something-he spotted something on a windowsill. A pink card. FAVORS-WE DO WHAT YOU WANT US TO DO! He pounced on it and held it up for Louise Monroe’s inspection. “See,” he said triumphantly. “I didn’t make it up.”

“I know,” she said, producing an identical card from her pocket. “Snap.”

“Where did you get that?”

“From the body of a dead prostitute.”

“Dead? As in ‘murdered’ dead?”

“No, she OD’d. No foul play, apart from drug trafficking, prostitution, economic exploitation, illegal immigration, of course. It’s not my case,” she said with a shrug, as if she didn’t care. Jackson was pretty sure that wasn’t so.

“Two dead girls turning up within twenty-four hours of each other,” Jackson said, “both with these cards on their bodies? What does that say to you?”

“The cards are the only thing that links them.”

“But that’s enough,” Jackson persisted. “I’ll bet you the cleaning agency’s a front, maybe it’s a way of getting girls into the coun-try, maybe they pick out the more vulnerable ones, take their pass-ports, threaten people they’ve left behind. You know the kind of stuff that goes on, for Christ’s sake. There’s a connection between the two girls, there has to be. It leads back to this place.”

“Could just be a coincidence.”

“You’re playing devil’s advocate. And I don’t believe in coinci-dence,” Jackson said. “A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen.”

“So much wisdom from one so foolish, and I would just like to remind you once again that you are not a policeman and this is not your case.”

“No, it’s your case.” Frustration was beginning to get the better of him. He wished he’d slapped a pair of handcuffs on the “Housekeeper” and secured her to the nearest heavy object. Or if he could have only anchored his dead girl to a buoy or clamped the pink van this afternoon, taken Marijut into custody, anything that would have provided immovable evidence rather than this shifting mirage. He felt as if he were trying to hold on to water. “If you believed me it would help,” he said, sounding more pa-thetic than he’d intended.

He thought she might get stroppy with him (yet again), but she walked over to one of the filthy windows and gazed out at the view-a stone wall opposite. Then she sighed and said, “Well, the sun’s over the yardarm and I’m off the clock. And I want a drink.”

“You like country music?” Louise Monroe said doubtfully. “Good- hearted women and bad-living men and all that stuff?”

“Well, it’s not all like that.”

“And you live in France?”This was more like an interrogation than a conversation. He thought he preferred it when she was casting doubts on his “psychopathology” and calling him an idiot.

“I’ve never been to France,” Louise said.

“Not even Paris?”

“No, not even Paris.”

“Not even Disneyland?”

“Christ, I haven’t been to France. Okay?”