One Good Turn

He had reached the last photograph of Venice. It was the view from their hotel window, over the lagoon, taken at the last moment by Julia (“Wait-we’ll forget this view”) before they boarded the Cipriani’s launch to St. Mark’s Square for the last time. She was right, he would have forgotten the view if there had been no record of it. But at the end of the day, no matter how beautiful, it was just a view. He could see what she meant about having people in pho-tographs, if she had been standing at the window with the lagoon behind her, it would have been a completely different photograph.

Then there was the photograph of him next to the One O’Clock Gun with the Japanese, then the photograph of the Na-tional War Memorial. There was only one more photograph after that. It was black, entirely black. Puzzled, Jackson rifled through the pictures again. Same result-nothing. No sign of the dead girl at all. Only the black photograph. He was reminded of the black square that Julia gazed into every night, the raging Arctic storm. He was wondering if the photograph of the dead girl had been erased, perhaps accidentally. He knew that you could never erase anything completely, it wasn’t deleting a file that destroyed it, it was writing new data over it. There were programs designed for retrieving images. It would be easy enough for a camera shop to do. Or police forensics.

“Did you want something,” Louise asked, “or did you just ring to annoy me?”

“You’re not really a morning person, are you?” he said. He suddenly realized what had happened. In his hurry to take the pho-tograph-dead body, rising tide, and so on-he had left the lens cap on. Oh shit. He banged his head on the table. The other pa-trons of Toast looked at him in alarm.

“Hello? Calling Jackson.”

“Nothing, I don’t want anything. You’re right, I was just ringing to annoy you.” He remembered something, something the crazy Russian girl said to him last night, and he asked Louise what she knew about “Real Homes for Real People.”

“Squirrels are eating my house,” Louise Monroe said unexpect-edly.

“Okay,” Jackson said slowly, unable to think of any kind of response to that statement. He wondered if they were particularly big squirrels.

38

Louise was struck by an odd kind of terror, some vague memory of a documentary or a film-fact or fiction, she didn’t know-a man waking up in a stupor and finding that his entire family had been butchered while he slept, stumbling from room to room and finding their bodies.

She woke up suddenly, too suddenly, tachycardiac and sweating, and it took several seconds before she was convinced it was a dream. That was when she heard the scrabbling. In the walls? Or above her head? Above her head. Claws or nails on wood, scratching, something running. It stopped. Started again, stopped again. She tried to imagine what was making the noise. Rodent Olympics in the attic. A couple of years ago she would have been able to put Jellybean up there, the feline terminator. Asleep on the bed, he shifted against her foot. She would have liked his professional opinion on the scratching, scrabbling things, but she didn’t want to disturb him. He slept nearly the whole day and night now. She had begun to think in terms of last days, that this might be his last breakfast, his last wash, his last walk outside. She no longer bought him cat food, instead she went to Marks and Spencer’s Food Hall and chose organic smoked salmon, slices of cooked chicken breast, and cartons of fresh custard, none of which he was able to take more than a few halfhearted mouthfuls of, more to please her, Louise suspected, than out of any real hunger. The last supper. Archie complained that he didn’t get fed as well as the cat, and he was right.

She hauled herself out of bed and padded along the hall, where she opened the door to Archie’s bedroom-she just needed to be completely sure that the nightmare had been a nightmare. Both boys were sprawled in sleep, Archie in his bed, Hamish in a sleeping bag on the floor. The room stank of boys. Louise imagined a girl’s room would smell of nail varnish, pencils, cheap candy sweets. Archie’s room was essence of testosterone and feet. In the gloom, she could just make out the rise and fall of Archie’s breathing. She didn’t bother examining Hamish for signs of life, boys like him should be culled as far as she was concerned.

Retrieving her heavy police-issue Maglite from under her pillow, she pulled down the Ramsay ladder from the trapdoor in the landing ceiling. She climbed up and lifted the trapdoor cautiously, imagining things jumping on her head and getting tangled in her hair, nibbling on her ears and lips.

The tiny attic skylight let in more of the morning than she’d expected, and extra illumination was provided through gaps in the slates. Louise was pretty sure there shouldn’t be gaps between the slates. It wasn’t really an attic, just a loft space that contained the water tank and had no flooring or power. An electric cable snaked across the floor instead of being snugged away in trunking, she could see that part of the outer plastic covering had been eaten through, exposing bare wires. The rafters and joists were rough and splintery, and there was no insulation. Louise wondered if it was illegal to build new houses without insulation. The loft seemed to underline the fact that the house had a permanently unfinished feel to it.

Something moved in the far corner, something small and nim-ble, a gray whisk of tail and then it was gone through a tiny hole where the roan pipe met the small overhang above the downstairs living room. A squirrel.

Louise swept her Maglite over the wall, she could see quite clearly now where the squirrel had made his getaway-a chink in the fabric of the house where a lump of cement must have fallen out, or (more likely, knowing Hatter Homes) had never been there in the first place. She ran the torch over the gable wall, an archae-ologist opening up a pharaoh’s tomb, and frowned as she traced a crack that ziggurated down the mortar between the bricks. It didn’t look like something you could blame on squirrels.

She made the awkward journey back through the trapdoor and down the ladder. As she reached the bottom rung, she nearly jumped out of her skin when a hand touched her bare arm. Hamish held out a mug of coffee to her, the image of a helpful but-ler, except that he was wearing nothing but a pair of boxers. Ad-vanced for his age. She was suddenly acutely aware of the shortness of the old T-shirt she had slept in. The little fucker had been looking up it the whole time she’d been climbing down the ladder.

“I put in milk but no sugar, Louise,” he said. “I thought you looked like someone who watched her figure.” She considered punching him, but she didn’t want coffee all over the hall, or a lawsuit from his banker daddy, an arsehole whom Louise had met at a parents’ evening. No coincidence that “banker” rhymed with “wanker.”

“Thank you,” she said and took the coffee from him. “You’d better get a move on, Hamish, you’re going to be late for school.” She emphasized the word “school,” just to remind him that he was actually, technically, a child. She wanted to see a little scowl of hu-miliation on his smooth, bourgeois features, but instead he said, “Goodness, Louise, you really need to chill.”

Louise pulled on shapeless sweats and went outside. She was still fuming at Hamish-now making breakfast in her kitchen, as comfortable as if he were in his own home. He made a surprisingly good cup of coffee, though. Archie had no idea how to make coffee unless it was instant. Louise wondered if Hamish made coffee for his own mother. It must be nice to have someone who did things for you. Perhaps in his own house he was as asocial and un-comfortable as Archie was at home, and perhaps, conversely, when he went to Hamish’s house, Archie went around like Little Lord Fauntleroy, saying, “Can I get you more tea, Mrs. Sanders?” to Hamish’s mother. No, that was a fantasy too far.

She stood on the pavement on the opposite side of the road, sipping her coffee while scrutinizing her house for flaws in the brickwork.

From somewhere inside the house, she could hear her mobile start to ring.

“That’s quite a crack,” a voice said. She turned and saw her next-door neighbor unlocking his car. He nodded his head in the direction of her front door and climbed into the driver’s seat, his family piling in after him. Louise moved smartly away from where she’d been standing and, looking up, saw a fissure crowstepping its way down between the brickwork above the porch. “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down.” In the story, the Big Bad Wolf hadn’t been able to blow down the house made of bricks, built by the sensible pig. Unfortunately, a sensible pig hadn’t built Louise’s house. Louise’s house had been built by the Big Bad Wolf himself, Graham Hatter. What had Jessica said? “Subsidence or something.”

“Fuck,” she said.