Kate Atkinson - One Good Turn

“So I’m told.”

“You’re an ex-policeman, a man of previously good character, it’s your first offense.”

“I’ve crossed over to the dark side.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to know what it was like.”

“And?”

“Dark.” He sighed and winced at the pain in his ribs. He had enough of this conversation. “What about Favors?” he asked. “Find anything?”

“I put Jessica on to it yesterday. There’s no entry in the phone book for them-”

“Surprise, surprise.”

“Nothing at Companies House , no e-mail address, no Web site, and thousands of Internet hits for everything ranging from dog-walking to hard-core porn, although none that’s obviously Edinburgh-based. Vice say they’d never heard of a sauna called Fa-vors, ditto a lap-dancing club.”

“You should look for the pink cards-phone boxes, toilets, pubs, clubs.” Jackson began to feel something he hadn’t felt for a while, for a moment he couldn’t identify it, and then he realized what it was-he was working a case-all the excitement of trying to put something together, of trying to get somewhere. (“Let’s face it, Jackson,you feel unmanned.”) “Have you asked the girls on the street?”

She said, “I can see your police antennae waving. Put them away.”

She had bitten her lip so that it had bled, he could see a scar or a scab, indicating it was a habit. She looked so in control, yet the whole drawing-your-own-blood thing hinted at all kinds of inner neuroses. He thought of the snake eating its own tail, devouring itself. He wondered what she’d been doing at the Sheriff Court. He didn’t ask, instead he said, “The man who attacked me last night, Terence Smith, aka Honda Man, was involved in a road-rage incident yesterday. He was a maniac, completely out of con-trol. Viking berserkers come to mind.”

“You saw it? What are you, some kind of professional witness, traveling around looking for crime scenes?”

“No, I’m cursed.”

She laughed and said, “Who cursed you?” and he said, “I think I did it to myself.” Because he was an idiot obviously. She looked like a different person when she laughed.

“I saw him take a baseball bat to someone in the street, and a few hours later the guy has a go at me, threatening me, telling me to keep my mouth shut about what I saw. He knew my name . How could he know that?”

“So you were the only witness to this road rage?”

“No,” Jackson said, “there were dozens of other witnesses. He didn’t see me, and he had much more reason to go after the guy who stopped him-some guy threw a briefcase at him. Maybe he’s warned him off as well.”

“Or maybe he was just a run-of-the-mill mugger and you imagined him threatening you.”

“Imagined?”The way she’d been listening to him he’d thought she believed him. He felt suddenly let down.

“Look at the evidence,” she said. “You say you witnessed a road-rage incident, you claim the alleged perpetrator of the inci-dent then assaulted you-although you yourself pleaded guilty to assaulting him -you claim you found a dead body, but there is no evidence to support that claim. You’re a millionaire, but you’re hanging around finding trouble in all the wrong places. Let’s face it, Jackson, on paper you just don’t look good.”

The unexpected use of his first name took him more by surprise than the reference to his personal circumstances, but then of course she would have run a background check on him. She wasn’t the stupid one here, he was the one with the bruises and the crim-inal conviction. He said, “You’ve got blood on your lip.”

Martin was woken by the dawn chorus. Even with his brain furred by sleep, it struck him as unlikely, the Four Clans was the kind of place where no birds sang, and sure enough, after a while he realized it was actually his mobile rather than an avian choir.

He fumbled for his spectacles, knocking the phone to the floor as he did so. Even with his spectacles on, he felt as if his eyes had been smeared with Vaseline. By the time he had recovered it, the phone had ceased chirping. He peered at the screen- 1 missed call . He went into the phone’s call registry. Richard Mott . Richard was probably wondering what had happened to him last night, although he wasn’t exactly the type who would care. He probably wanted the loan of something.

He put the phone down on the bedside table and found him-self looking at a woman being burned at the stake. Her mouth was open in a gulping howl of oval as the flames from the piles of wood surrounding her began to catch at her body. It was a print of a woodcut hanging on the wall. OLD EDINBURGH, a label beneath it declared. When they drained the Nor Loch to make Princes Street Gardens, they discovered it was not just the reposi-tory of the town’s sewage and refuse but also the final resting place of the town’s witches-their trussed-up skeletons tied thumbs-to-toes like birds ready for roasting. And those were the innocent ones, the ones who sank. Martin had never understood that-you would think that innocence would be an airy substance that would make you float, that evil would be heavy, sinking you to the bottom to the slimy, stinking mud.

Now, on the site of the witch burnings, there was an expensive restaurant where the cream of the Edinburgh bourgeoisie dined. That was what the world was like, things improved but they didn’t get better.

Martin’s neck ached, and his limbs felt as if they’d been tied up in knots all night, as if he himself had been trussed. He was in the bed, but he had no recollection of lying down next to Paul Bradley. No recollection of removing his spectacles or his shoes. He was relieved that he was still fully dressed. The smell of frying bacon penetrated the room and made him feel sick. He peered at the digital clock on the radio next to the bed-twelve o’clock, he couldn’t believe he’d slept so long. Of Paul Bradley there was no sign-no holdall, no jacket, nothing-the man might never have existed. He remembered the gun, and his heart gave a little flip. He had spent the night in a hotel room (in the same bed!) with a complete stranger and a gun. An assassin.

He unfolded his body cautiously and lowered his legs to the floor. A spasm in his lower back stopped him, and he had to wait for it to pass before he could stand up and wobble on jelly legs to the bathroom. The inside of his mouth felt like cardboard and his head seemed enormous, too heavy for the stalk of his neck. He felt as if he’d been given an anaesthetic, and for one paranoid mo-ment his heartbeat spiked as he wondered if Paul Bradley had been part of some complex scam to harvest organs off innocent by-standers. Or carbon-monoxide poisoning? The beginning of the famous summer “flu” or the end of an Irn-Bru hangover?

He slaked an outrageous thirst with chemical-tasting water from the tap and checked himself in the bathroom mirror, but he couldn’t find any visible operation scars. Rohypnol? Date rape? (Surely he would know?) Something had happened to him, but he had no idea what. Had he been given some mind-altering drug that was making him mad? But why would anyone want to do that? Unless it was the gods who were going to destroy him next. They had bided their time, it was more than a year since Russia, since the incident .

The last day, their guide, Mariya, had let them loose in a market somewhere behind Nevsky Prospekt, where there was stall after stall displaying tourist wares-nesting Russian dolls, lacquered boxes, painted eggs, Communist memorabilia, and fur hats deco-rated with Red Army badges. But mostly there were dolls, thou-sands of dolls, legions upon legions of matryoshka , not just the ones you could see but also the ones you couldn’t-dolls within dolls, endlessly replicating and diminishing, like an infinite series of mirrors. Martin imagined writing a story, a Borges-like construction where each story contained the kernel of the next and so on. Not Nina Riley, obviously-linear narratives were as much as she could cope with-but rather something with intellectual cachet (something good).