One Good Turn

wasn’t possible without killing something else.

Nina Riley was a great one for camping, of course. She had learned to love the outdoor life in Switzerland during the war and frequently loaded up provisions in the boot of her Bristol and took to the hills of her Highland home. She had a pair of stout walking boots, an army-style tent, and an old-fashioned canvas ruck-sack with leather straps in which she carried her thermos and thick sandwiches of beef and mustard. She boiled up water from peat-brown burns to make tea. She caught fish-trout in the rivers or mackerel from a sea loch-then she fried her fresh-caught fish for breakfast before setting off for a daylong hike, during the course of which she might well come across something suspicious and have to spy on it. “Looks jolly suspicious to me, Bertie. I think our friend’s a bit of a blackguard.” Bertie himself never got to speak much. The television producer had suggested to Martin that Nina and Bertie should “have some sexual tension going on. They’re both a bit bland, you know?” Martin wondered if he was going mad, if this was what it felt like.

He passed the circus on the Meadows on his way from the cafe to the office. He had always found circuses unsettling, the per-formers fragile and quite superfluous to the needs of the planet, yet they seemed to Martin to behave as if they knew things he didn’t. The Mysteries. A Russian circus. Of course. What else? The whole of Mother Russia come to town to bring him to jus-tice over their lost daughter. “Here this doll special, very good artist. Scenes from Pushkin, Pushkin famous Russian writer.You know him?” Kafka had taken over the authorship of his life. He was being deleted, wiped out of memory and history, and quite rightly because that was what he had done to Irina. He had thrown her away like rubbish. He had erased her from the earth, and he in turn was being erased.

Someone had been in the office. The place hadn’t been trashed or turned over, it was little things-the microwave door was open, and in the bin in the kitchen there was an empty polystyrene box, a half-eaten burger, and an empty Coke can. There was a sweet wrapper on the floor, a chair was on the other side of the room from where it usually was. The different-colored pads of Post-it notes he kept squared up against one another on the desk had all been moved around. It wasn’t so much as if a thief had been in; it was more as if an untidy secretary without enough work to do had spent the afternoon in here being bored.

He opened the drawers of the desk, everything was still in order, the pens and pencils neatly aligned, the paper clips and the highlighters in the right place. Only one thing was missing. Martin knew what it would be, of course, before he even opened the drawer. The CD that was the backup of Death on the Black Isle, the last refuge of his novel. He slumped into the high-end office chair that came with the rental. That was when he noticed that a pink Post-it note had been torn off the pad and stuck in the middle of the unadorned white wall opposite the desk. Someone had written a message for him on it. “Fuck you, Martin.” He felt a tattoo of pulses and thuds in his chest. Something viral was happening to him. From his wake-up call this morning to his incarceration at the Four Clans this evening, everything had been unrelentingly awful.

His wake-up call this morning! It had been from Richard. 1 missed call. He’d been in too much of a stupor to answer, and then he had forgotten all about it. He must tell the police. It was an im- portant piece of evidence. He took out his phone, it was down to its last bar of battery.

He wished now that he had answered the phone this morning, he might have been the last person that Richard spoke to. “Oh, my God,” Martin said out loud, his mouth making the same oval of horror as the flaming witch on the engraving in his room at the Four Clans. What if Richard had phoned him during… his or-deal? What if he’d been looking desperately for help? If Martin had answered the call-could he have prevented Richard’s death in some way? (“Stop, you blackguard!”) Martin put his head on the desk and moaned. But then he had a thought. He lifted his head and gazed at the pink Post-it note stuck to the wall. Richard had phoned at ten o’clock, Martin remembered looking at the time on the clock radio by his bed at the Four Clans, but Superintendent Campbell said that Richard died between four and seven o’clock in the morning, so he couldn’t have phoned at ten. Unless he had phoned him from beyond the grave. On cue, in a way that even Nina Riley couldn’t have arranged, the phone in his hand chirped. The tom-tom thuds of his heart grew wilder, more erratic. “Richard Mott,” the screen said.

He was on the pirate boat again, feeling it lift on its terrible un-stoppable ascension, taking his body with it but leaving his mind behind, moving toward its zenith, the nanosecond of a pause at the top of its curve. It wasn’t the rise that was the terror, it was the fall.

His imaginary wife bravely took up her knitting. She had recently begun a fisherman’s Guernsey for him. “This will keep you warm this winter, darling.” Martin was toasting pikelets on a brass toasting fork. The fire was roaring, the pikelets were piping hot, everything was safe and cozy. Richard Mott had gone beyond the grave and knew everything. Martin’s heart was beating so hard it actually hurt. Was he having a heart attack? His wife said something to him, but he couldn’t hear her because the fire was roaring so loudly. Irina’s doll-blue eyes suddenly flew open. No, she wasn’t here. She couldn’t be in his lovely cottage. It wasn’t allowed. He was fading, falling, a curtain was coming down. Something black and monstrous was inside him, its wings beating in his chest. His wife’s needles clacked furiously, she was trying to save him with her knitting.

Martin spoke tentatively into his phone. “Hello?” he said. No one spoke. His phone gave a last feeble cheep and died. Crime and Punishment. An eye for an eye. Cosmic justice had come to town. He started to cry.

32

There were no elephants, of course. You didn’t see animals in circuses anymore. Jackson remembered only one circus from his childhood, contrary to what Julia thought, he had been through a childhood (of sorts). The circus he remembered from forty years ago (could he really be that old?) had been pitched on a field owned by the colliery at the edge of town, in the shadow of a slag heap. It had been full of animals: elephants, tigers, dogs, horses, even-Jackson seemed to remember-an act that featured pen-guins, although he might have got that wrong. Even now he could remember the intoxicating smell of the big top-sawdust and an-imal urine, candy floss and sweat-and the lure of exotic people whose lives were so different from Jackson’s that it had hurt him like a physical pain.

Louise Monroe had refused his invitation. Julia had given him only one ticket anyway, although he would have bought another one if Louise had said yes.

The circus on the Meadows didn’t hold out the same promises and terrors as the circus of long ago. It was a Russian circus, although there was nothing particularly Russian about spinning plates, trapezes, and high-wire work, only the clowns acknowl-edged their national origins in an act based on Russian dolls- “matryoshka,” it declared in the program. The word of the day. He thought of the boxes that had been stacked in the hall of the Fa-vors office, stenciled with MATRYOSHKA. He felt the peanut-baby doll in his jacket pocket. The layers of the onion. Chinese boxes, Chinese whispers. Secrets within secrets. Dolls within dolls.

The ringmaster (what Julia had meant by “circus wallah chappie,” presumably) looked like ringmasters the world over, the black top hat, the red tailcoat, the whip-he looked more like he was about to orchestrate a foxhunt than MC a load of spangled kitsch. He was way too tall to hold any attraction for Julia. The circus, the program also said, shared space with “The Lady Boys of Bangkok,” Jackson was relieved some passing Lady Boy hadn’t given Julia tickets for his/her show.

“Murdered,” Julia said. Last night he had watched Richard Mott onstage, now the poor guy was in a refrigerator somewhere. Jack-son would have applauded him more generously if he’d known it was his final appearance. Was he murdered because he wasn’t funny? People killed for less. The reasons people killed other peo-ple had often seemed trivial to Jackson when he was with the po-lice, but he supposed it was different from the inside. He had once been in charge of a case where an eighty-year-old man had hit his wife on the head with a mash hammer because she’d burned his morning porridge, and when Jackson said to the old bloke that it didn’t seem like a reason that was going to stand up in court, the man said, “But she burned it every morning for fifty-eight years.” (“You could have had a word about it with her earlier,” a DS said dryly to him, but that wasn’t how it worked in a marriage, Jack-son knew that.) When you retold it, it seemed almost funny, but there had been nothing comical in seeing the old woman’s brains all over the worn linoleum or watching the old