One Good Turn

then he stole my wallet. I wouldn’t mind, but I saved his life.”

“A Welrod?” Jackson queried. How did Martin know about guns? About Welrods, for heaven’s sake.

“And someone broke into my office, well not broke in, there was no sign of a break-in, but there was a sweet wrapper on the floor-”

“A sweet wrapper?”

“I don’t eat sweets! And now it turns out that Paul Bradley doesn’t even exist! And he was my alibi.”

“Alibi?”

“For murder.”

“Murder?” Jackson revised his opinion, maybe this was the second kind of deranged.

“A man was murdered in my house! Richard Mott, the come-dian, and then he phoned me.”

“Whoa. Richard Mott was murdered in your house?”

“Yes. And then he phoned me.”

“Yes, you said that.” Could Martin tell the difference between fact and fiction? He was a writer, after all.

“Not him, I know it wasn’t him. The murderer must have taken his phone-his phone was missing-and then he phoned me on it.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know!”

“Okay, okay, stay calm.” Jackson sighed. You said five little words to someone-How can I help you?-and it was as if you’d mort-gaged your soul out to them.

Despite the fact that everything Martin said sounded out-landish, there were little anchors of truth in his story. And who was Jackson to criticize, after all? He had tried to save a dead girl from drowning, he had killed a dog with the power of his thoughts. Jackson wondered if Martin still lived with his mother. Not that there was anything wrong with that, Jackson would quite like to be living with his own mother, his time with her having been cut so short. No, Martin didn’t live with his mother, he lived with Richard Mott, didn’t he?

“Not lived,” Martin corrected. “He was staying with me while he was up for the Festival. I hardly knew him, actually. I didn’t even like him. What if his killer is coming after me next?”

“I think you need to talk to the police, Martin.”

“No!”

“Give them your phone so they can try to trace the call.”

“No!”

They were a contentious bunch. He had never heard of Dougal Tarvit, nor E. M. Heller. He’d never heard of Alex Blake, come to that, until yesterday evening. On his way over to the Book Festi-val, he had popped into a bookshop and leafed through one of “Alex Blake’s” books in the coffee shop. It was innocuous stuff, depicting a kind of retro-utopian Britain that was rife with aristo-crats and gamekeepers-although no one seemed to have sex (which would fit with Martin’s neutered demeanor). It was a non-sensical kind of setting where murders were tidy affairs that resulted in inoffensive corpses, the stuff of Sunday-evening television, the equivalent of a hot bath and a warm mug of cocoa. The serfs weren’t revolting, they were positively happy in their chains, and the rank smell of death didn’t corrupt the genteel, heather-scented air around Nina Riley’s head. “‘Don’t go in there, Miss Riley,’ the gillie said,‘it’s no’ a sight for a bonny young lassie’s eyes.’”

Nina Riley had a sidekick. Didn’t they all? Robin to her Bat-man. “I’ve discovered something important, Bertie. I must see you.” There was a guy named Burt who used to be his brother Francis’s best friend. Both welders, both rugby players. Burt had broken down at Francis’s funeral-it was the only thing Jackson could remember about his brother’s funeral-Burt crying at the graveside, ugly masculine sobs, coughed up by a macho guy who probably hadn’t cried since he was a baby. Francis had killed himself, in a brutal, casual way that Jackson now recognized as being typical of his brother. “You stupid fucking bastard, Francis!” Burt had shouted angrily to the coffin as it was lowered, before a couple of guys wrestled him away from the open maw of the grave. Francis had never been “Frank” or “Fran,” he had always been called by his full name, it had lent him a certain dignity that he had possi-bly never really earned.

Jackson didn’t remember his sister’s funeral because he hadn’t attended it, staying with a neighbor instead. Mrs. Judd. It was a long time since he’d thought about Mrs. Judd, the sooty smell of her back parlor with its overstuffed cut moquette, the gold eyetooth that gave her a slightly rakish, gypsy air although there had been nothing unconventional in a life that had been defined by the pit-daughter of a miner, wife of a miner, mother of a miner.

Jackson was all dressed, ready to go to Niamh’s funeral, he could recall the black suit he was wearing, made from a cheap, felty ma-terial, he’d never seen it before and never saw it again, but when it came time to go, he simply couldn’t, shaking his head mutely when his father said, “Best get going, son.” Francis said gruffly, “Come on, Jackson, you’ll be sorry if you don’t come and say good-bye to her proper-like,” but Jackson had never regretted not going to that terrible funeral. Francis was right, though, he had never properly said good-bye to Niamh.

He was twelve years old and had never worn a suit before, and it would be years before he wore one again- Francis’s funeral hadn’t merited one, apparently-and all he remembered about that day was wearing someone else’s ill-fitting suit and sitting at Mrs. Judd’s little kitchen table with its worn Formica, dotted with cigarette burns, and drinking sweet tea and eating a Birds Eye chicken pie. Funny the things you remembered. “Bertie, this was no accident, this was murder!”

He had expected someone to come up to him in the coffee shop and ask him with a sarcastic sneer if he was intending to buy the book or just sit there all day and read it for free, but then he realized that no one cared and he could indeed have sat there all day, with a sickly latte and an even more sickly blueberry muffin, and read Alex Blake’s entire oeuvre without paying, if he so wished. Nobody worked and the books were free.

Jackson didn’t read much fiction, never had, just the occasional spy or thriller thing on holiday. He preferred factual books, they gave him the feeling that he was learning something, even if he forgot it almost immediately. He wasn’t really sure he saw the point of novels, he didn’t go around saying that, because then people thought you were a philistine. Maybe he was a philistine. Julia was a great reader, she always had a novel on the go, but then her whole professional life was based on fictions of one kind or another, whereas his whole professional life had been based on fact.

He wasn’t much better with art. All that fuzzy Impressionism didn’t do it for him, he’d looked at endless water lilies and thought, What’s the point? And religious paintings made him feel as if he were in a Catholic church. He liked representational art, pictures that told a story. He liked Vermeer, all those cool interi-ors spoke of an ordinariness he could relate to, a moment in time captured forever, because life wasn’t about legions of Madonnas and water lilies, it was about the commonplace of details-the woman pouring milk from a jug, the boy sitting at the kitchen table, eating a chicken pie.

You could tell Tarvit was an arrogant prick, and E. M. Heller (what kind of a name was that?) was just plain odd, she was either a badly put-together woman or she was a man in drag. Trans-vestism was a mystery to Jackson, he had never in his life worn a single item of female clothing, apart from once borrowing a cash-mere scarf from Julia when they were going for a walk and being troubled all afternoon by its perfumed softness around his neck. Martin seemed blithely unaware of the signals that E. M. Heller was sending his way. The guy definitely had a look of celibacy about him, he reminded Jackson of a vicar or a monk. E. M.- Eustacia Marguerite or Edward Malcolm? Whichever, E. M. was going to have her work cut out with Martin.

Jackson felt faintly ludicrous, standing like a Secret Service agent behind Martin in the “Signing Tent” (he had originally mis-read it as the “Singing Tent”-an idea that had both alarmed and confused him). The Book Festival was a jamboree of tents and reminded him vaguely of an army field camp. He had a sudden flashback to the smell of the big top last night, the familiar scent of grass under canvas. The crazy Russian girl like a bandit queen, with her knife at his throat.

Martin glanced up nervously as each new person approached him, as if he were waiting for an unknown assassin. Jackson didn’t understand why he was doing the event if he was so worried. “I’m not going to hide away,” Martin said. “You have to face the thing you’re afraid of.” In Jackson’s experience it was often best to avoid the thing you were afraid of. Discretion really was sometimes the better part of valor.

“But at the same time you’re worried that someone’s after you? The person who stole Richard Mott’s phone,