One Good Turn (36 page)

He was on the pirate boat again, feeling it lift on its terrible un-stoppable ascension, taking his body with it but leaving his mind behind, moving toward its zenith, the nanosecond of a pause at the top of its curve. It wasn’t the rise that was the terror, it was the fall.

His imaginary wife bravely took up her knitting. She had recently begun a fisherman’s Guernsey for him. “This will keep you warm this winter, darling.” Martin was toasting pikelets on a brass toasting fork. The fire was roaring, the pikelets were piping hot, everything was safe and cozy. Richard Mott had gone beyond the grave
and knew everything
. Martin’s heart was beating so hard it actually hurt. Was he having a heart attack? His wife said something to him, but he couldn’t hear her because the fire was roaring so loudly. Irina’s doll-blue eyes suddenly flew open. No, she wasn’t here. She couldn’t be in his lovely cottage. It wasn’t allowed. He was fading, falling, a curtain was coming down. Something black and monstrous was inside him, its wings beating in his chest. His wife’s needles clacked furiously, she was trying to save him with her knitting.

Martin spoke tentatively into his phone. “Hello?” he said. No one spoke. His phone gave a last feeble cheep and died. Crime and Punishment. An eye for an eye. Cosmic justice had come to town. He started to cry.

32

T
here were no elephants, of course. You didn’t see animals in circuses anymore. Jackson remembered only one circus from his childhood, contrary to what Julia thought, he had been through a childhood (of sorts). The circus he remembered from forty years ago (could he really be that old?) had been pitched on a field owned by the colliery at the edge of town, in the shadow of a slag heap. It had been full of animals: elephants, tigers, dogs, horses, even—Jackson seemed to remember—an act that featured pen-guins, although he might have got that wrong. Even now he could remember the intoxicating smell of the big top—sawdust and an-imal urine, candy floss and sweat—and the lure of exotic people whose lives were so different from Jackson’s that it had hurt him like a physical pain.

Louise Monroe had refused his invitation. Julia had given him only one ticket anyway, although he would have bought another one if Louise had said yes.

The circus on the Meadows didn’t hold out the same promises and terrors as the circus of long ago. It was a Russian circus, although there was nothing particularly Russian about spinning plates, trapezes, and high-wire work, only the clowns acknowl-edged their national origins in an act based on Russian dolls—
“matryoshka,”
it declared in the program. The word of the day. He thought of the boxes that had been stacked in the hall of the Fa-vors office, stenciled with MATRYOSHKA. He felt the peanut-baby doll in his jacket pocket. The layers of the onion. Chinese boxes, Chinese whispers. Secrets within secrets. Dolls within dolls.

The ringmaster (what Julia had meant by “circus wallah chappie,” presumably) looked like ringmasters the world over, the black top hat, the red tailcoat, the whip—he looked more like he was about to orchestrate a foxhunt than MC a load of spangled kitsch. He was way too tall to hold any attraction for Julia. The circus, the program also said, shared space with “The Lady Boys of Bangkok,” Jackson was relieved some passing Lady Boy hadn’t given Julia tickets for his/her show.

“Murdered,”
Julia said. Last night he had watched Richard Mott onstage, now the poor guy was in a refrigerator somewhere. Jack-son would have applauded him more generously if he’d known it was his final appearance. Was he murdered because he wasn’t funny? People killed for less. The reasons people killed other peo-ple had often seemed trivial to Jackson when he was with the po-lice, but he supposed it was different from the inside. He had once been in charge of a case where an eighty-year-old man had hit his wife on the head with a mash hammer because she’d burned his morning porridge, and when Jackson said to the old bloke that it didn’t seem like a reason that was going to stand up in court, the man said, “But she burned it every morning for fifty-eight years.” (“You could have had a word about it with her earlier,” a DS said dryly to him, but that wasn’t how it worked in a marriage, Jack-son knew that.) When you retold it, it seemed almost funny, but there had been nothing comical in seeing the old woman’s brains all over the worn linoleum or watching the old guy, all rheumy eyes and shaking hands, being put in the back of a police car.

To be honest, Jackson was surprised that more people didn’t kill each other. Julia was definitely lying to him about something.

One face in the sea of faces across the other side of the ring caught his attention. It wasn’t just a cliché, it really was a sea of faces, he found it almost impossible to focus on one. He’d been under the impression that long sight was supposed to improve with age and short sight deteriorate (or was it the other way round?), but he seemed to be losing out on both of them. But if he concentrated, no, it was actually better if he didn’t concentrate, he could make out the girl. Her face was tilted upward, watching the trapeze artists, her expression serene, beatific. Her eyes only half-open, as if she were watching but thinking of something else. She was so like the dead girl it was impossible. His girl, curled up on the rocks, a mermaid dreaming, and he had disturbed her sleep. He squinted, trying to make out the features of the girl in the au-dience, but his focus slipped and she was gone, swimming off into the sea of faces.

He fell asleep while a human pyramid was being constructed out of acrobats, and when he woke he felt disoriented. The roof of the big top was dark blue, spangled with silver stars, and it reminded him of something but he couldn’t think what, and then he realized it was the roof—the vault of heaven—in a side chapel at the Catholic church where his mother dragged them three times a day on a Sunday when they were very small, until she ran out of energy and let the devil have them.

Maybe Julia wasn’t lying exactly, just not telling the truth.

W
hen Jackson exited the big top on the Meadows along with the rest of the audience, he was greeted by a pearly dusk. The gloaming. It was so much lighter up here, a transient Nordic light that spoke to his soul. He took a seat on a bench and turned his phone on. There was a text from Julia,
“In the trav bar come and find us”
(not even a
“J”
or a single
“x”
this time, he noticed, let alone
“love”
or punctuation). It sounded more like a challenge or a treasure hunt than an invitation to a drink. He guessed “the trav” was the Traverse, which was both good and bad, good because it was nearby and he was sure he knew how to get there, bad because he’d been there the first night with Julia and the cast, and it was a smoky underground place full of posers up from London. Maybe he could persuade her out of there, take her to one of the many Italian restaurants around this part of town. He seemed to remember a plan to cook for her tonight. The best laid plans of mice and men. They had studied that book at school, that is to say his fellow pupils had studied it at school, Jackson had looked out the window or played truant. He remembered the little plaque at the Scottish War Memorial.
THE TUNNELLERS’ FRIENDS
. He felt strangely bereft.

Although there were still plenty of people milling about, light was fading fast on the Meadows, and away from the streetlamps that bordered the paths there were now murky pools of darkness presenting opportunities for all kinds of transgression. Everything suddenly seemed darker, and Jackson realized that the lights on the big top had been switched off. Something seemed to drop inside him, a leaden weight, a memory of walking home from that circus forty-odd years ago, holding his mother’s hand—his mother was no more than a shadow of a memory now—walking away up a hill, it was a town built on hills, and looking back and seeing the big top, ablaze with lights, being abruptly plunged into darkness. It had disturbed him in a way that, as a small boy, he couldn’t put words to. Now he knew it was melancholy. Melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic—that was what Louise Monroe had called him yester-day.
“You seem remarkably phlegmatic, Mr. Brodie.”
What was the fourth? Sanguine. But melancholy, that was his own true humor. A miserable bastard, in other words.

“The lamps are going out all over Europe,”
he thought. God, that was a wretched quotation. He had been reading a lot of military history lately, courtesy of Amazon. He thought of the Binyon poem again.
“At the going down of the sun.”
The rest of the verses were crap. Earl Grey was actually watching the streetlamps being
lit
, not put out, although, of course, some people thought it was an apocryphal quotation. God, would you look at him, a sad middle-aged loser sitting on a park bench at twilight thinking about an old war he never took part in. Jackson rarely thought about the wars he
had
taken part in. All he needed was a can of lager. When had he started thinking of himself as a loser?
“We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
He wouldn’t blame Julia if she had grown bored with him.

And then, instantly, his self-pity was forgotten because there she was. It was her, it was his dead girl. He hadn’t imagined her in the big top, she had been there and now she was
here
, walking across the Meadows, in and out of the shadows cast by the trees, coming toward him.

She was wearing heels and a short summer skirt so that you couldn’t help but admire her perfect legs. He stood up abruptly and set off toward her, wondering what he should say—
“Hey,you look just like a dead girl I know”?
As opening conversational gambits went, it left something to be desired. He knew she wasn’t really his dead girl, unless the dead had begun to walk, which he was pretty sure they hadn’t. He couldn’t imagine the kind of chaos that would ensue if they did.

And then—and in Jackson’s opinion this was becoming just a wee bit tiresome—who should slip out of the shadows but his old enemy, Honda Man. Terence Smith creeping up behind the not-dead girl on tiptoe in a way that reminded Jackson of a cartoon character. The man was a juggernaut, juggernauts shouldn’t try to tiptoe. The girl might not be dead, but it looked as if Terence Smith were intending to make her that way, not with his trusty bat in his hand but a length of what looked like nylon rope. Dog, bat, rope—he was a one-man arsenal. “Hey!” Jackson yelled to get the girl’s attention. “Behind you!” Did he really say that? But it was no pantomime joke and no pantomime thuggee—Terence Smith already had the rope round her neck. Jackson’s warning cry had alerted her, however, and she had managed to get her hands on the rope, tugging on it for all she was worth to prevent Terence Smith from tightening it.

Jackson sprinted along the path toward the two of them. There were other people closer, but they seemed benignly unaware of a girl being strangled in front of their eyes. Before Jackson reached them, the girl managed to do something swift and admirably effective that seemed to involve the heel of her shoe and Honda Man’s groin, and poor old Terry collapsed onto the ground with an ugly noise.
Unmanned
, Jackson thought. The girl didn’t hang around, instead she kicked off her shoes and started running back the way she had come, in the direction of the circus, and by the time Jackson reached Terence Smith, now retching with shock, the girl was out of sight.

Honda Man’s moans attracted a couple of passersby who seemed to be of the opinion that he was the victim of an assault and that the perpetrator of the assault must be the man standing over him.
Been here, done this
, Jackson thought. His brain was lagging vital seconds behind, still trying to compute the convergence of himself, his old pal Terry, and a girl who looked like the dead girl in the Forth. He had seen the crucifixes in her ears as she struggled with her assailant.
You say coincidence
, he thought,
I say connection
. A baffling, impenetrably complex connection, but nonetheless a connection. Jackson was torn between wanting to interrogate Terence Smith, with the added bonus of then beating him to a pulp, or running after the dead girl look-alike.

The decision was made for him by the arrival of a police car containing two uniformed constables, one male, one female, a breeding pair, who were soon out of the car and walking along the path in that determined way Jackson remembered well, slow enough to assess a situation but ready to accelerate at the drop of a hat. One of the passersby pointed at Jackson and shouted, “This is the man who did it!”
Oh thanks
, Jackson thought,
thanks very much
. He’d already been convicted of assaulting Terence Smith once already today, a second time would probably send him straight to jail. He took a deep breath, which hurt, and ran.

One of the police, the female of the pair, stayed with Terence Smith, who was still making a fuss over his manhood. Jackson would quite like to have known what exactly the girl did back there and hand on the arcane knowledge to the women in his life the next time they found themselves being lifted off their feet with a rope round their neck. God forbid.

The other constable lumbered along the path after Jackson. He was on the hefty side and normally Jackson could have outrun him easily, but he was handicapped by his bruised ribs, so he darted off the main drag into the tangle of caravans and lorries that surrounded the big top. He stumbled and tripped, knocked something flying. Someone shouted abuse at him, and he didn’t stop to find out who or why but carried on running, weaving in and out of the assortment of vehicles that made up the circus laager.

He paused inside an avenue of trucks to catch a breath. He could hear the policeman talking to someone. He rather hoped that some vagabond instinct among the members of the circus troupe would lead them to help him and misdirect the law
(“He went that way”)
. No such luck. The police constable, unfit but dogged, passed across the top of the avenue of trucks. Jackson flattened himself against the side of a huge generator, but too late, the guy had spotted him, yelling something inarticulate in surprise at suddenly coming upon his quarry. The policeman in Jackson wanted to reassure him that he wasn’t dangerous, the guy didn’t have his partner with him, no one covering his back, and had no idea what Jackson was capable of, so he was probably more scared than Jackson was. What
was
he capable of? he wondered.