Kate Atkinson: One Good Turn

Out in the street she pushed the second phone deep into the first waste bin she came to. She was sure it would be emptied soon, the Swiss being so famous for their cleanliness. What she had seen of the country so far was very appealing. She imagined buying a little dark-wood chalet in the countryside, window boxes full of trailing geraniums in the summer, crisp white snow piled on the roof in winter. A basket of kittens sleeping by a log-burning stove.

There was so much work to be done. She would move through the world righting wrong. Legions of kittens, horses, budgies, mangled boys, murdered girls, they were all calling to her. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled .

She would be feared by the bad. She would be a legend in her own lifetime. She would be cosmic justice. That should definitely be said with capital letters. Cosmic Justice. Incontrovertibly and without argument, Cosmic Justice was a Good Thing.

Jackson had got as far as Scotch Corner before he turned round and headed back north. He found that he couldn’t, after all, just drive off into the sunset. Martin had asked him to help him, and he had said yes. The guy had saved his life and needed him to tes-tify on his behalf, and it wasn’t possible to just walk away from that.

The Angel of the North came back into view, holding his rust-red airplane wings above the land like a great protector. Jackson had slipped from the righteous path, but it was okay, he was back on it now.

He didn’t need the gun, as it turned out. The only explanation he could come up with for its disappearance was that Martin had taken it when they were in the hotel room together, before he slipped him the Mickey Finn. He should have checked that it was there before he left the hotel. That was a mistake. There was no room for mistakes in his career. Maybe it was time for him to do something else, go in a different direction, do that OU degree, start an ostrich farm, run a B and B.

When he had eventually opened up his bag, there was a Gideon Bible inside instead of the gun. The golfing trophy lay innocently on top, looking slightly skewed out of its original position so you knew the little chrome golfer was never going to be able to hit the ball straight. Ray had played golf a few times, had quite liked it, the force of the drive, the precision of the putting. It had appealed to both sides of his natural skills. He’d picked up the trophy in a charity shop. Some starving kid somewhere in the world benefiting by a penny from some old geezer’s golf trophy. R. J. Hudson. You had to wonder about him, who he was, what was his life? The trophy was dated 1938. Had R. J. Hudson fought in the war, had he died in the war? Or had he outlived everyone he knew and died alone? Would that happen to himself? No. He’d blow his own brains out first. Do as you would be done by.

You could imagine it happening to Martin, though. Ray expe-rienced an unexpected twinge of fondness for Martin. He had told him way too much about himself. Anything was too much, even nothing was too much. By the time Ray had returned to the Four Clans to look for him, to ask him about the gun, Martin had gone. He’d like to kill him for messing him about like that, but then the guy saved his life, so he owed him. A life for a life.

A gun would be too obvious in this place, and unnecessary con-sidering that all he had to do was reach over and flick a switch. Basically, he could just turn the guy off. God knows what he was hooked up to, it looked like only the machines were standing between him and eternity. He could probably just let nature take its course, but better to be safe than sorry, as they say. And anyway, he’d been paid to do a job, so do the job he would.

It had been easy enough to get into the ICU, the fat nurse on night duty asked him if he was a close relative and he’d put on a sad face and said, “I’m his son, Ewan. I’ve just flown back from South America,” and she’d put on a matching sad face and said, “Of course, let me take you to your dad.” He’d sat with “Dad” a while, companionably, as if he really were his son. “You’re a hard man to find, Graham,” he said softly to him. He had been looking all over the place for him. There was no way for his client to get in touch with him once the job was put in motion. That was the way Ray liked it. Safe, not sorry. A phone call at the beginning, a phone call at the end.

It was funny being back in the hospital. The A and E had been noisy and chaotic, not like here. It was peaceful at Graham’s bed-side, apart from the blinks and beeps of the machines. He had thought of him as “Hatter” when he was hunting him down, but finding him like this, as helpless as a baby, the guy seemed to merit a little tenderness. He took out the syringe from the inside pocket of his jacket. Full of nothing. Air. You needed air to live, you didn’t think of it as something that would kill you. The air would travel in his vein, find his heart, stop the pumping action, stop the blood flow, stop the heart. Stop Graham dead. It took only the littlest thing. He lifted the covers from Graham’s feet and found the vein in his ankle. “This won’t hurt a bit, Graham,” he said. Ray of light, Ray of darkness. Ray of sunshine, Ray of night.

He replaced the covers. Graham’s heart would go into cardiac arrest in a few seconds and all hell would let loose, nurses running all over the place, even the fat nurse, heaving her hips heroically along the corridor.

Time to go. He patted Graham’s blanketed leg. “Night, night, Graham. Sleep tight.”

Outside, it was beginning to spit with rain again. He made the phone call to his client. There was no answer, so he left a message on her voice mail.

“Congratulations, Mrs. Hatter,” he said. “Our business is concluded.”

I owe a debt of gratitude to Martin Auld, Malcolm R. Dixon (deputy chief constable, Lothian and Borders Police), Russell Equi, Major Michael Keech, Sheriff Andrew Lothian, Dr. Doug Lyle, and Dr. Anthony Toft for telling me things they knew and I didn’t. Apologies if I have misunderstood that information or, occasionally, willfully misused or distorted it.

Thank you to David Robinson and Donald Ross at the Scots-man , to Reagan Arthur, Kim Witherspoon, and Peter Straus, and to Little, Brown and Transworld.

Thank you also to David Lindgren for trying, and usually failing, to explain corporate law to me and, more important, for being a lawyer who lunches.

Thanks also to Alan Stalker and Stephen Cotton for coming to the rescue in hard times.

Last but not least, thank you to the writer Ray Allan for graciously allowing me to steal a story from his life.

Kate Atkinson’s first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum , won the Whitbread First Novel Award and was then chosen as the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year. She is the author of a short story collection, Not the End of the World , and three other critically acclaimed novels, Human Croquet, Emotionally Weird , and Case Histories . She lives in Edinburgh.