Kate Atkinson - One Good Turn

He could have gone over earlier, left his jacket, and then sim-ply entered the water from Cramond, but as hoaxes go it seemed very elaborate.

Or perhaps there was a dead girl, and it was Jackson Brodie who had killed her. First person to discover the body-always a prime suspect. He was a witness, yet he felt like a suspect. (Why was that?) He said he’d tried to pull her out of the water to stop her from floating off on the tide, but he could just as well have put her in the water. Deflecting suspicion from himself by being the one who called it in.

She heard Archie stumbling down the stairs, falling into the kitchen, grunting something that was almost certainly not “Good morning.” His face was raw with spots, his ham-skin looked as if it had been boiled. What if Archie didn’t undergo a transforma-tion? What if this wasn’t his pupa stage, what if this was it?

She put Weetabix in a bowl, poured milk on it, gave him a spoon. “Eat,” she said. A dog would be more capable. Being four-teen meant he had slipped back down the evolutionary ladder to some presocial rung. Some men of Louise’s acquaintance had never climbed back up again.

She wanted to talk to him about the shoplifting. She wanted to talk to him about it in a reasonable way, not losing her temper, not yelling at him, telling him what a stupid fucking idiot he was. Lots of kids shoplifted and didn’t go on to a career of crime-take her-self, for example. Although she had, of course, gone into a career of crime, it was just that she was on the good side. Hopefully.

Maybe it was regular, maybe it was only once, she didn’t know. Louise had been with him at the time, so she had to presume that it was some kind of rebellion against her, some psychological acting out. They were in Dixons in the St. James Center, celebrating her mother’s death by buying a big flat-screen TV in anticipation of the insurance money. Louise had taken out life insurance on her mother years ago, deciding she would never profit in any way from her life, so she may as well cash in on her death. It was a small policy, she couldn’t have kept up big payments on it, and once or twice it had struck her that if it had been really serious money (two million) , she might have been tempted to knock her mother off. A simple accident, drunks fall down stairs all the time, after all. And a detective knows how to cover her tracks.

Archie had taken something stupid-a pack of AA batteries that he could easily have paid for. It wasn’t about paying, of course. She was at the other end of the shop when the door alarm went off, and then a security guard ran past her, pouncing on Archie as he exited, laying firm hands on a shoulder and an elbow, turning him round, and propelling him back inside. The professional part of her brain registered the catch as businesslike and efficient. The unprofessional part of her brain considered leaping on the security guard’s back and jamming her thumbs in his eyes. No one ever warned you about how ferocious mother love could be, let’s face it, no one warned you about anything.

She thought about looking helpless and throwing herself on his mercy, unfortunately looking helpless was not one of her greatest talents. Instead she marched up to the pair of them, flipping out her warrant and coolly asking if there was anything she could do. The security guard launched into his explanation, and she said, “It’s okay, I’ll take him in, have a word with him,” frog-marching Archie out of the shop before the security guard could protest, before Archie could say something stupid (like Mum ). She heard the security guard shout after her, “We always prosecute!” She knew they’d be on tape and spent some anxious time afterward waiting to see if anything came of it, but nothing did, thank God. She could probably have found a way of making the tape disappear. She would have eaten the tape if necessary.

Outside, in the underground gloom of the multistory car park, they had sat together in the cold car, staring out the windshield at the oil-stained floor, the concrete pillars, the mothers hustling toddlers in and out of car seats and pushchairs. Oh, God, but she hated shopping centers. There wasn’t even any point in asking him why, because he’d just shrug his shoulders and stare at his trainers and mutter, “Dunno.”The artful dodger.

She could see that from his point of view it was unfair-she had so much power while he had absolutely none. A contraction of pain seized up her insides. Another turn of the corkscrew. That was love. As strong as the first time she touched him after he was born, lying on her chest like a barnacle, in the labor suite of the old Simpson Memorial Maternity Pavilion (now, at the new hos-pital, it was renamed “The Simpson Center for Reproductive Health,” it wasn’t the same somehow). Louise knew, at that first touch, one way or another, they were stuck together forever.

It seemed to her, sitting there in the car park, that he was as helpless now as he was then, and she wanted to turn round and punch him in the head. She had never hit him, never, not once, but she’d come close to it a thousand times, most of them in the last year. Instead she put her hand on the horn and kept it there. People in the car park looked around, thinking it was a car alarm. “Mum,” he said finally, quietly, “don’t. Please stop,” which was the most articulate thing he’d said to her in weeks. So she stopped. It all seemed a high price to pay for a desperate, drunken bout of sex with a married colleague who never even knew he’d fathered a child.

She had a sudden, unwelcome flashback to the bump and grind of Archie’s genesis. PC Louise Monroe in the back of an un-marked squad car with DI Michael Pirie, the night of his leaving “do.” He had a new promotion and an old wife, but that hadn’t stopped him. People used to think that the circumstances of a child’s conception shaped that child’s character. She hoped not.

“What?”Archie said, glaring at her, a mustache of milk around his mouth.

“Ophelia,” Louise said. “She drowned. Ophelia drowned.”

Louise went up to the bathroom and opened the window, cleaned the shower, picked up sodden towels, flushed the toilet. She wondered if he would ever be house-trained. It was blankly impossible to modify his behavior, she wondered what would happen to him under the threat of torture, perhaps she should sell him to science or the army. The CIA would find him a fascinating subject-the boy who couldn’t be broken.

She put in her contacts, applied makeup, enough to have made an effort, not enough to be blatantly a woman, a white shirt beneath a trim black suit from Next, court shoes with a slight heel, no jewelry apart from a watch and a pair of modest gold studs in her ears. She would go back out to Cramond as soon as she could, join her team to dot the i’s and cross the t’s on the case that never was, but this morning she was due to give evidence in Alistair Crichton’s court-a car scam, stealing high-end cars in Edinburgh and selling them in Glasgow with new plates. She and a DS, Jim Tucker, had worked doggedly to put a case together for the procu-rator fiscal, Crichton was an old bastard and a stickler for proce-dure and she didn’t want her appearance to get in the way of her evidence. She had done Jim a big favor last year. He had a teenage daughter, Lily, one of those clean-cut types, thick hair, lots of good orthodontic work, all her grade exams on the piano. Lily had just triumphed in her Highers and was set to go to university on a Royal Navy scholarship to study medicine, and then Louise had helped to net her in a drugs raid on a flat in Sciennes. It turned out to be just a bit of dope, sixth-years from Gillespie’s, and a couple of first-year university students, Louise had recognized Lily straightaway. They were all taken down to the station, and a couple of them were charged for possession. It was one of those jobs that looked like overkill afterward, lots of shouting and breaking down of doors, and in the confusion Louise had armlocked Lily and walked her out of the flat and hissed in her ear, “Scarper,” and more or less pushed her down the stairs, into the night, and into her safe, high-achieving future.