One Good Turn (25 page)
The housekeeping account was drip-fed automatically from a Hatter Homes account, whenever money was debited from it, more was credited, whatever went out one day was topped up overnight. It was almost like magic. No one seemed to have noticed the five hundred a day that Gloria had been siphoning off. Her nest egg. It was entirely legal, it was a joint account, her name was on it. Five hundred a day, every day except Sunday, Gloria’s day of rest, monitored by her Baptist conscience. The new money-laundering regulations made it difficult to move large sums of money around, but five hundred a day seemed to keep her below the radar of both the Hatter Homes accountants and the bank. Sooner or later, she supposed, an alarm bell would ring, a flag would go up, but by then the accounts would all probably be frozen, and if there was any justice in the world, Gloria would be gone with her black plastic bag of swag. Seventy-two thousand pounds wasn’t a lot to start a new life on, but it was better than nothing, better than what most people in the world had.
G
loria emptied Graham’s belongings out of the bag and laid them on the maple wood draining board of the laundry room. His shoes, polished to a licorice-like shine, the jacket and trousers of his suit, the Austin Reed shirt, his expensive silk socks that someone, a nurse presumably, had rolled into a ball, the cotton vest and boxer shorts from Marks and Spencer—his underwear seemed particularly depressing to Gloria—and, last, his blandly corporate tie, curled limply at the bottom of the plastic bag like a dispirited snake.
It was strange to see his clothes laid out like that, flat and two-dimensional, as if Graham had suddenly become invisible while wearing them. Now they had all been swapped for a cotton gown that showed his Roquefort legs and his not-so-firm buttocks. The cotton gown would in turn soon be swapped for a shroud. With any luck.
Gloria had a sudden image of her brother’s mutilated body when it had been shown to his family in the hospital mortuary, wrapped up in white sheets, like a mummy or a present. Gloria wondered which of her parents had thought it was a good idea to let their fourteen-year-old daughter view the dead body of her brother, nicely wrapped or not.
Jonathan had a place at college to do an HND and was working in the mill only for the summer between school and college. There had been several mills in Gloria’s hometown when she was a child, now there were none. Some had been demolished, but most had been converted into flats or hotels, one into an art gallery and another into a museum where ex-mill workers demonstrated to the public the jobs they used to do in a past that was now officially history.
The week before her brother died, he had taken Gloria inside the mill. He was proud of where he was working, doing a “man’s job.” It wasn’t dark and satanic, as she had imagined from singing “Jerusalem” in school assemblies, rather it was full of light and as big as a cathedral, a hymn to industry. Tiny strands and puffs of wool floated in the air like feathers. And the noise! The “clattering, shattering, shuttling noise”—she had written a poem later for her grammar school magazine “in the style of Gerard Manley Hopkins,” thinking it might heal some part of the grief, but the poem was poor (“wool-dappled white air”) and came from the head, not the heart.
There had been talk of prosecution after Jonathan’s death—all kinds of health and safety laws had been flouted at the mill—but it never progressed beyond talk, and Gloria’s parents lacked the passion to pursue it. Her sister (so recently dead) was twenty at the time and upstaged their brother by turning up in a pair of jeans and a black polo-neck sweater for his Baptist funeral. Gloria had fully admired her sister’s gesture.
The only other time Gloria had been inside a real cathedral of industry was long ago, on a school visit to Rowntree’s factory in York, when her class had marveled every step of the way, from the Smarties being tumbled around in what looked like copper ce-ment mixers to the packing room where women were tying ribbons around boxes of chocolates with (yes) pictures of kittens on them. At the end of the tour they had been given bags of mis-shapes of all kinds, and Gloria had returned home triumphantly bearing dozens of two-fingered KitKats that had, like Jonathan, been mangled by the machinery.
She took the phone from Graham’s jacket pocket. What had Maggie Louden said last night?
“Is it done yet, is it over? Have you got rid of Gloria? Have you got rid of the old bag?”
Was that what she was—an old bag? Maggie Louden was well over forty, she’d be an old bag herself soon enough.
The phone had run out of battery power (rather like its owner). Graham’s suit could do with going to the dry cleaners, but really, why bother? If he died, all of his suits were going to the Oxfam shop on Morningside Road, apart from the one he would wear for his funeral. This one might do, a bit of a brush and a press, no point in getting something cleaned when it was going into the ground to rot.
She plugged Graham’s phone into the charger in the kitchen and carefully typed out a text to Maggie Louden. She tapped out
“Am in thurso speak to you tomorrow g”
—she was pretty sure Graham wouldn’t bother with any punctuation or grammar, but then she changed it to
“Sorry darling am in thurso speak to you tomorrow g”
and then redrafted it a third time to
“Sorry darling am in thurso not much of a signal here don’t bother phoning speak to you tomorrow g.”
What Gloria remembered most was that York was a town that smelled of chocolate whereas she came from a town that smelled of soot. Of course, you could no longer go on tours of Rowntree’s, now it was owned by some multinational conglomerate that didn’t want anyone inside their gates, watching what they were doing. Now that her sister was dead, Gloria was the only person who remembered her brother. It was extraordinary how quickly a person could be erased. Death triumphant.
She took a bag of birdseed from underneath the sink in the laundry room and poured it into a bowl. Out in the garden, she broadcast the seed around the lawn and, for a moment, felt quite saintly as all the birds of Edinburgh descended on her garden.
L
ouise surveyed the corpse on the slab dispassionately. She considered it best to leave her emotions at the door when it came to postmortems. There were a lot of programs on television these days in which the police and the forensics all banged on about how a dead body wasn’t just a dead body, it was a
person
. The pathologists were always addressing the deceased as if they were alive
(“Who did this to you, sweetheart?”)
, as if the victim were suddenly going to sit up and give them the name and address of their killer. The dead were just dead, they weren’t people anymore, they were only what was left over when the person was gone forever. The remains. She thought of her own mother and reached for the Tic Tacs.
The mortuary was crowded with the usual suspects, a photog-rapher, technicians, forensics, two pathologists—a Noah’s Ark of postmortem specialists. Jim Tucker was standing off to one side, Louise knew he had a poor stomach for this kind of thing. He saw her and frowned, surprised that she was there. She gave him a thumbs-down signal and saw him mouth, “Oh, shit.”
Ackroyd, the pathologist, caught sight of her and said, “You’ve missed a lot of the good stuff, stomach, lungs, liver.”Ackroyd was a bit of a pillock.
The second pathologist on the sidelines acknowledged her with a little nod and a smile. She’d never seen him before. Only the most routine postmortems were done with one pathologist, two were considered necessary “for verification.” One and a spare. “Neil Snedden,” he said with another smile as if they were at a so-cial event. Was he flirting with her? Over a corpse? Nice.
“You here for her?” he asked, nodding at the woman on the slab.
“No, I need a word with Jim—DS Tucker.”
The dead girl looked unhealthy, more unhealthy than just straightforward dead. Ackroyd hefted her heart in his hand. An assistant, a girl named Heather, if Louise remembered correctly, hovered nearby, holding a metal pan like a baseball mitt, as if the pathologist might be about to toss the organ in her direction. When it was placed, rather than thrown, on the dish, Heather took the heart away and weighed it as if she were intending to bake a cake with it.
Louise reached out and touched the back of her hand against the nerveless one of the girl. Warm flesh against cold clay. The quick and the dead. She had a sudden memory of her mother at the undertaker’s, her face like cold, melted candle wax—the Wicked Witch of the West. Jim Tucker raised an inquiring eyebrow in her direction, and she gestured him to one side.
The dead woman’s clothing was on a nearby bench, waiting to be bagged and taken to forensics at Howdenhall. The bra and pants weren’t a matching set, but they both displayed Matalan labels. This was why you should wear matching underwear, Louise reminded herself, not for the off chance of a sexual encounter but for eventualities like this. The dead-on-a-fishmonger’s-slab sce-nario where the whole world could see that you bought your oddly matched underwear in cheap shops.
“Working girl, found in a doorway on Coburg Street. Drug overdose. Vice knew her,” Jim Tucker said. He dropped his voice. “What happened?”
“Crichton threw the case out on a technicality. Nonappearance of a witness.”
“You’re joking? He could have held off, asked us to find the witness.”
“We’ll go to appeal,” Louise said. “It’ll be fine.”
“Shit.”
“I know.” Something caught her eye, on the bench with the clothing—a little pile of business cards sitting on a petri dish. “What are these?”
“Found in her pocket,” Jim Tucker said. “The lady’s calling cards.”
Pale pink, black lettering. FAVORS. A mobile number. Just like Jackson Brodie had said.
“We thought maybe a call-girl agency,” Jim Tucker said. “We’ve not been able to get anything from the phone number.”
“She’s got a call girl’s calling card but you think she’s a street girl?” Louise puzzled.
“She was a druggie, I’m guessing it didn’t really matter to her whether she was in a hotel room or a doorway.”
Louise didn’t think that was true for a minute. If she was selling herself, she’d rather be doing it in a nice, warm hotel room, knowing someone knew where she was. “I’ve been looking for Favors myself, we’ve come up with nothing so far.”
“Something I should know about?” Jim Tucker asked.
“Not really. A missing girl, but I’m not convinced she existed in the first place.”
“Ah, your so-called dead body yesterday. I heard you called out all the troops for nothing. She hasn’t turned up?”
“Not yet.”
“What was that I heard about a body in Merchiston?”Ackroyd shouted across to her.
“No idea,” she said. “That’s Edinburgh South, nothing to do with me.”
“I live in Merchiston,”Ackroyd grumbled.
“There goes the neighborhood, Tom.” Neil Snedden laughed. He winked at Louise. Louise wondered if she could have sex with someone who was so twinkly in the face of death. She supposed it would depend how good-looking he was. Snedden wasn’t remotely good-looking.
Ackroyd took out a small electric saw and began to slice the top of the girl’s head off as if it were a boiled egg. “Look closely,” he said to a green Jim Tucker, “this is the only time you ever really get to see what’s inside a woman’s head.”
T
he sight of Jackson Brodie walking out of the Sheriff Court this morning had given her a start. That little flip-flap to the telltale heart.
Louise wondered what Jackson Brodie had been like when he was fourteen. Did he have all his virtues (and drawbacks) in place by then, could you have looked at the boy and seen the man in him? Could you look at the man and see the boy?
The pink cards existed. Louise had the proof in her pocket, the top one swiped from the pile while everyone was looking at Ackroyd performing his party piece. Okay, so it was tampering with evidence, but it wasn’t as if it were the only card. At the end of the day, what did it matter if there was one less? Really?
She phoned Jeff Lennon, he was the guy at the station who knew everything. A DS a few weeks away from retirement, the face of a tortoise, the memory of an elephant. Handicapped by a bad knee, he was seeing out his last days doing a reluctant catch-up on paperwork, and she knew he would be glad of an excuse to do something else.
“Do me a favor?” she asked him.
“If you ask nicely.”
“Nicely. Can you find out about a road-rage incident in the Old Town yesterday? The attacker drove off, can you check that someone caught the registration?” Jackson said there were “dozens of other witnesses,” but when Jeff phoned back a few minutes later, it was to report that no one had remembered, although “someone thought the car was blue.”
“Well, I’m the bearer of good news,” she said. “Blue is correct, and what’s more it was a Honda Civic, and I can give you a reg-istration, I’ve got a witness.” She had called him “Jackson” to his face. It had felt unprofessional, even though it wasn’t.
“Jeff? One more wee favor? Get me an address for a Terence Smith, in court this morning.”
J
im Tucker had a dead girl carrying around with her a card for Fa-vors. Jackson Brodie had a dead girl carrying around with her a card for Favors. Jim’s girl was definitely a prostitute of some ilk, therefore there was a good chance that Jackson’s girl was too. She realized that she was thinking about Jim Tucker and Jackson Brodie as if they were equals. Write out ten times,
Jackson Brodie is not a detective
. He was a witness. A possible suspect as well, even if the charge was only wasting police time. And he was certified guilty of assault, even if he claimed he was innocent. Let’s just say it again, Louise—he was a witness, a suspect,
and
a convicted felon.
T
here was nothing like a night in the cells to give you an appetite. Jackson was starving, but raking round the cupboards of the tiny kitchen, he could find only dried-up instant gravy granules and some perforated tea bags that smelled herbal and repellent. That was something useful he could do today, find a supermarket or, preferably, a good deli, stock up on decent stuff, and cook something for them to eat tonight, something wholesome. Jackson’s culinary repertoire consisted of five dishes that he could cook well, which were five more than Julia could cook.
