One Good Turn

Jackson sensed the mistake immediately. Julia’s eldest sister, Sylvia, had drowned herself in the bath, a formidable act of will that Jackson almost admired. She was a nun, so Jackson supposed all those years of discipline had put the iron in her soul. His own sister hadn’t drowned, she had been raped and strangled and then dumped in a canal. Water, water, everywhere. They were linked, he and Julia, by these things. “Like some kind of karmic concate-nation,” she had ruminated once. He had to look up the word “concatenation,” it had sounded Catholic, but it wasn’t. From the Latin “catena,” a chain. The chain of evidence. Chain of fools. He wished now he’d had a classical education rather than an army ed-ucation. A good school, a degree, the world his own daughter was growing up in. The world Julia had grown up in, but then look how fucked up that had been. He wanted to tell Julia about the woman in the Forth, about his own near-drowning experience, but she had returned to herself, applying lipstick, peering at her lips in the mirror with professional detachment, smacking them together and making a face as if she were kissing her reflection.

Jackson wondered what it said about a relationship when you were unable to tell the “object of your affection” that you had been pulled out of the water like a half-drowned dog. “Lucky”- inevitably-had been the name of the dog that had scooted with joy off the pier at Whitby. The owner of the dog, the first man to drown that day, had a wife and eight-year-old daughter, and Jackson had wondered what had happened to the dog. Had they taken Lucky home with them?

“But you’ll be finished in time for the show?” Julia said.

“The show?”

As she was going out the door, Julia said, “Oh, while I remember, can you do me a favor? I dropped the memory card off at the chemist next to the flat. I thought if you didn’t have anything better to do you could pick the photographs up.”

“And what if I do have something better to do?”

“Do you?” Julia asked, curiosity rather than sarcasm in her voice.

“Hang on,” Jackson said, “back up-what photographs? What memory card?”

“The one from our camera.”

“But I lost the camera,” he said, “I told you I lost it at Cramond.”

“I know, and I told you that I phoned up the police lost prop-erty at Fettes and someone had handed it in.”

“What? You didn’t tell me that.”

“Yes, I did,”Julia said, “unless there was someone else lying next to me in bed pretending to be Jackson.”

When had Julia had time to drop things off at the chemist, to fill up the fruit bowl, to make phone calls, have lunch with Richard Mott? And yet she hadn’t had a second to give to him.

“Scott Marshall,” she continued blithely, “that nice boy who plays my lover, drove out to Fettes and picked it up for me.”

“They just handed it over to him?” Jackson said, astonished (“my lover,” the way she said it, so casual). “Without any proof?” He thought of the image of the dead girl trapped in the camera. Had someone looked at it, developed it?

“I described the first three photographs on the memory card over the phone,” Julia said, “and that seemed to satisfy them. And I told them that someone named Scott Marshall would be picking them up. He showed them his driver’s license. Crikey, Jackson, do we have to dissect every aspect of police procedure regarding lost prop- erty?”

“What are the first three photographs on the memory card?” Jackson asked.

“Are you testing me?”

“No, no, I’m intrigued. I have no idea what they are.”

“They’re of you,” Julia said, “they’re of you, Jackson.”

“But-”

“I have to dash, sorry, sweetie.”

No wonder identity fraud was such a fast-growing crime. The chemist was as lax as the police, Jackson had no receipt, no proof that the photographs were his, yet they were handed over promptly to him when he said that “Julia Land” had dropped them off this morning. The chemist (a man) smiled at him in a knowing way and said, “Yes, of course,” so Jackson presumed that Julia had used the full force of her orange- selling charms on him. If you were a man, you could be eighty with a Zimmer and Julia would flirt with you while she helped you across the road-because, and this was one of the reasons he loved her, she was the kind of person who walked old people across the roads, helped blind people in supermarkets, scooped up lost cats and injured birds.

She couldn’t help the flirting, it came automatically to her as if it were embedded in her personality. Julia flirted with dogs, for heaven’s sake. He had even seen her flirt with inanimate objects, cajoling a kettle into boiling faster, a car to start, a plant to flower.

“Oh, come on, sweetie, if you just try a little bit harder, you can do it.”

Perhaps he should look on it as a social service rather than as a threat, send her out to old people’s homes to give old guys the illusion of virility, make them feel good about themselves again. Vi-agra for the mind. There was something pathetic about old men. Guys who had fought in wars, witnessed empires topple, strode around boardrooms and factory floors like kings, won the bread, paid the dues, walked the walk, talked the talk, and now they couldn’t even piss without help. Whereas old women, no matter how frail, never seemed as pitiful. Of course there weren’t as many old men around as there were old women. Dry and brittle as old kindling maybe, but they were built to last.

He took the photos into Toast and settled into a booth. He felt an emotion similar to that of unwrapping a gift, the same anticipa-tion, the same surge of excitement, only on the dark side-the ob-verse, that was the fancy word for it, the word Julia would have used. The photograph would be welcome proof that he hadn’t hallucinated his experience in the Forth, unfortunately it would also be unwelcome proof that someone, somewhere, was dead.

A waitress brought over his coffee, and when she was safely back behind the counter he opened the packet of glossy six-by-fours. They were printed in the order they had been in on the memory card-the first three were indeed of Jackson, taken in the snow in France on Christmas Day, Julia trying out her new camera. He looked much the same in all three, striking awkward poses, managing a half-smile in the last one after much coaxing on Julia’s part. “Oh, come on, sweetie, if you just try a little bit harder, you can do it.” He hated having his photograph taken.

Then there were a couple more of France and then nothing until Venice because Julia had accidentally left the camera behind when she returned to London after New Year’s. She had packed in haste, typical Julia, and they had made love, a last-minute farewell thing, when she should already have been on the road to the air-port, let alone packing.

He dialed Louise’s mobile number. The phone rang for a long time.

Venice still looked beautiful, but now rather than simply being holiday photographs, the little Canalettos looked like poignant images of halcyon days, a record of their golden age together as a couple. Just before the cracks appeared. “A couple? Is that how you think of us?”

When Louise Monroe called him “Jackson” yesterday (“Let’s face it, Jackson, on paper you just don’t look good”), it felt like a switch had been thrown, just that little buzz of an electrical current kicking in. Bad dog, Jackson. He had thought better of himself than that.

She was, let’s face it, his type. Julia was so much not his type that she was off the radar. Louise. This was what happened when you went over to the dark side. When you became bad Jackson, you started to lust after other women. “Watch out for Pisceans,” Julia had said. Was Louise Monroe a Piscean? She would be a new path. Not necessarily a good path or a better one, just a new one.

After several rings a male voice (posh Edinburgh) answered, “The Monroe residence, can I help you?” Jackson was caught off guard, he hadn’t expected a man to answer, much less a pretentious-sounding wanker. He had expected better of Inspector Monroe. Before he could say anything, she came on the phone with a snappish, “Yes?”

“It’s Jackson, Jackson Brodie,” he said.