One Good Turn

Grunting with the effort of it, he rolled the rhinoceros weight off and pulled himself up to a sitting position (great difficulty and much pain, etc.) and looked at his watch. It was an automatic reaction, an echo of other times, other places-Time of death… the suspect entered the premises at… the incident was logged at…. a quarter to eight but high noon for Jackson. Julia’s show was due to start in fifteen minutes. His whole day had piv-oted on that one appointment. “But you’ll be finished in time for the show?” His watch, he noticed groggily, was spattered with blood.

Tatiana lit a casual cigarette and took Terence Smith’s pulse.

“Is dead,” she said, somewhat unnecessarily. He wasn’t just dead, he was outstandingly dead, his heart ripped open by a bullet.

“Bull’s-eye, Martin,” Jackson murmured. Who would have thought Martin had it in him to be a crack shot? Tatiana came over to Jackson and knelt down next to him. She peered at him and said, “Okay?”

“In some ways.”

“You save my life,” she said.

“I think it was that guy over there that saved you,” Jackson said. Martin was still standing on the lawn with the gun slack in his hand, aimed at the grass now. He seemed very calm, like someone who’d made peace with himself. Jackson heard a siren and thought, That was quick, but Gloria Hatter said, “Panic button,” in a matter-of-fact way to no one in particular.

Tatiana leaned closer to Jackson. Her eyes had that dreamy look he remembered from the circus. She kissed him on the cheek and said, “Thank you.” He felt strangely privileged, as if a wild animal had allowed him to stroke it.

Jackson didn’t really care one way or the other that Terence Smith was dead. Maybe he’d seen too many dead people to get upset about another one, or maybe it was just that Honda Man was a bad piece of work and there wasn’t enough room on the planet for the good people, let alone all the bad ones. There were starving people, tortured people, just plain poor people who could do with his oxygen. He wasn’t the only one in the room to be un-perturbed by Terence Smith’s passing. “Eye for an eye,” Gloria Hatter said with magnificent indifference. The only person who seemed upset by what had happened was the woman with orange hair, who was whimpering quietly on the sofa.

Jackson heaved himself onto his feet and approached Martin cautiously. Close-up, he had a panicky, wild look in his eye. From past experience Jackson had found it best to treat panicky, wild-eyed guys like scared animals, they might be essentially harmless but they could still kick and bite.

“Stand easy, Martin,” he said gently. “Come on, now, give me the gun.” Martin handed the gun over without any hesitation. “Sorry,”he said. “Sorry about that.”Then his knees gave way, and he collapsed in a sad little heap on the lawn so there was only Jack-son, Welrod in hand, standing over Terence Smith’s dead body when the first officer on the scene arrived.

“This looks bad, doesn’t it?” Jackson said.

46

Louise turned in to the Hatter Homes’ car park at their head-quarters on Queensferry Road. Some kind of flunky in a uniform came toward her to question her right to be there, and she slapped her warrant card against the windshield and nearly mowed him down. Real Homes for Real People. How had Jackson found out there was a connection between Hatter Homes and Terence Smith? She would bet her bottom dollar that he was on the hunt. Was there ever such a troublesome man?

She was single-handed. Both Jessica and Sandy Mathieson had succumbed to the “flu.” Before she came here she had swung by the Four Clans, but there had been no sign of Martin Canning. The CD was hidden now, safely slipped inside an old Laura Nyro CD. She figured that was the last place anyone would look.

When she got inside, she found the Hatter Homes’ offices were in chaos. She recognized a couple of guys from fraud. One of them said to her, “No sign of Hatter anywhere.”

“Have you tried his house?” she asked, and the guy from fraud said, “Next on our list. The wife’s the other director, she’s in deep shit as well.”

She went looking for the woman behind the man, Hatter’s sec-retary (“Christine Tennant”), who immediately started whining, “I haven’t done anything. I know nothing. I’m innocent.” The lady was protesting a little too much, in Louise’s opinion. She remembered the crack that was running down the middle of her house. If nothing else, Hatter was a rotten builder. There was a fruit basket on Christine Tennant’s desk. Louise could read the card tied to it with a ribbon. It said, “Just a little token of apprecia-tion. Best wishes, Gloria Hatter.”

“Terence Smith?” she asked Christine Tennant.

“What about him?”

“What does he do, exactly?”

“He’s horrible.”

“Maybe, but what does he do?”

The secretary shrugged and said, “I don’t know exactly. Sometimes he drives Mr. Hatter or runs errands for him, does favors. Mr. Hatter’s in Thurso at the moment, though. ‘So they say,’” she added darkly.

“Can you give me Mr. Hatter’s home address? I’d like to talk to his wife?”

Christine Tennant reeled off the address. In the Grange. Nice, Louise thought. She’d bet Gloria Hatter’s house didn’t have a crack in it.

On the way over to the Hatter house, Louise wondered if Archie had come straight home from school or if he were roaming around town, creating mayhem and mischief? Archie and Hamish ought to be tethered somewhere, some dark, quiet place where they could do no harm. Instead they’d be in shops, on buses, in the streets, laughing like imbeciles, howling like monkeys, getting into trouble. If he had a father, if he had a father like Jackson-or even a father like Sandy Mathieson-would he be different?

Her radio crackled into sudden life. “ZH to ZHC-personal-attack alarm at Providence House, Mortonhall Road.To any set that can attend, your call sign and location please.” Louise didn’t bother responding. She was already there. Somehow it seemed unlikely that it was a coincidence. What had Jackson said? “A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen.”

“This looks bad, doesn’t it?” Jackson said.

“Yes,” she agreed, “but no doubt you’ve got an outlandish ex-planation.”

“Not really. You got here fast.”

“Coincidence. Looks like I missed the good stuff again.” He was standing over Terence Smith’s dead body with a gun in his hand, covered in blood. Her heart contracted uncomfortably. Was he injured?

“Are you hurt?”

“Yes, a lot, but I’m okay. I don’t think it’s my blood.”There was a man sitting on the lawn mumbling something about taking vows, the next time she looked at him he seemed to have fallen asleep. There was a woman with peachy-colored hair that complemented the sofa she was sitting on who was having a mild fit of hysterics. “Mrs. Hatter?” Louise asked her, but she didn’t respond.

“I don’t know who she is,”Jackson said. Very helpful. “And the guy asleep on the grass is Martin Canning.”

“The Martin Canning? The writer? The guy who lives with Richard Mott?” Oh, this was too weird. Weird piled on weird.

“You need to secure the crime scene,” he said. “No, you know that, don’t you? Of course, you’re a detective inspector.”

“You’re so not in a position to be making jokes.”

He wiped the prints off the gun and put it on the ground. Jesus, she didn’t believe he’d just done that! She should cuff him and arrest him right there on the spot. He said, “The gun belongs to someone called Paul Bradley, but he doesn’t exist.” He looked around and asked, “Where are the other two?”

“What other two?”