One Good Turn (45 page)
“And who’s Terence Smith?”
“It’s a long story, Martin.”
I’ve got time
, Martin thought, but he didn’t say it. Time was the only thing he did have, nanosecond after nanosecond ticking down. “I’ll just stay here while you go in.” He yawned. He won-dered if the Irn-Bru cocktail that the so-called Paul Bradley had given him had permanently affected his metabolism in some way. One minute he was so edgy he was twitching, the next he was so tired he couldn’t keep his eyes open.
“Won’t be long,” Jackson said.
Martin looked through his glove compartment for something to read. All he could find was a wad of flyers for Richard’s show—miniature versions of his
COMIC VIAGRA FOR THE MIND
poster—that he must have left in there on Tuesday.
He closed his eyes and was just falling into a sickly doze when he suddenly heard a familiar, unmistakable tune. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up like bristles. The
Robin Hood
theme song wafted in through the open car window. His heart bumped against his chest wall. Richard Mott’s phone was ringing. In the street. Close by. Martin spun round looking for the source of the fugi-tive theme. A blue Honda had driven up and parked behind his own car. A blue Honda. A blue Honda? No, there were thousands of blue Hondas around, it wasn’t necessarily the one that belonged to the insane baseball-bat-wielding driver. The theme to
Robin Hood
started up again. Martin opened the door and stumbled out of his car. There was no sign of anyone. Then he spotted him, walking up the driveway of the Hatters’ house, the phone to his ear. It really was the Honda driver from Tuesday. The Honda driver had Richard Mott’s phone. How could that be, unless he had killed Richard Mott? And why would he kill Richard Mott—unless it was the Honda driver who had picked up his laptop, found his address, and come to Merchiston to kill Martin. Martin felt as if the blood had just left his body.
Martin was expecting him to ring the doorbell and announce himself in the usual way, but instead the Honda driver crossed the lawn and stood in front of the French windows. He finished his call and produced the baseball bat, again out of nowhere. He raised it high as if he were preparing to hit for the outfield, but instead he smashed it into the glass of the windows.
T
his was the deal. When Celine Dion had sung her lungs out, when Tatiana had eaten her way through the fruit bowl, she reached into her bra, conjured out a Memory Stick, and said, “Do you know what this is, Gloria?”
“A Memory Stick, I believe,” Gloria said.
“Whose Memory Stick, Gloria? Whose?”
“Yours?” Gloria hazarded, wondering if she was being subjected to some form of Slavic Socratic irony. “I know it’s not mine,” she added.
Tatiana handed her the Memory Stick and said, “No, it’s
ours
, Gloria. You share with me, fifty-fifty.”
“Share what?”
“Everything.”
The Magus’ book. Graham’s secret accounts, all contained on one tiny tablet of plastic that Tatiana had taken from the pocket of Graham’s summer-weight wool, as he lay flapping like a fish on his Apex bed.
“I thought you tried to resuscitate him,” Gloria said thought-fully. Tatiana made a sad clown face. “Don’t,” Gloria said with a shudder.
There had been something on the radio this morning about horses. Someone had left dozens of horses locked up in a stable and gone away and all the horses had starved to death. Gloria thought about the big brown eyes of horses, she thought about
Black Beauty
, the saddest book ever written. She thought about all the horses with sad brown eyes you could help if you had a lot of money. The headless kittens, the Sellotaped budgies, the mangled boys.
“Hm,” she said.
G
loria gazed thoughtfully at her screen saver of border collie puppies for a while and then tapped the space bar and brought her computer back to life. She typed in “Ozymandias” and, just like that, she entered into Graham’s occult books.
“How did you know the password?” she asked Tatiana.
“I know everything.” Gloria could think of a lot of things that Tatiana probably didn’t know (how to make scones, the whereabouts of the Scilly Isles, the terror of aging) but didn’t bother challenging her. She was oddly touched that Graham had used the title of the Shelley poem for his password. Perhaps he had, after all, appreciated the gift she had given him. Or perhaps he was just looking for the most obscure word he could find.
Graham’s Memory Stick contained a lot of the humdrum of commerce—
feasibility studies, projected figures, tight margins
. The world seemed full of so many vague concepts, but you had to wonder—were these actually important? (Were they even real?) Shouldn’t a person’s life be based on simple, more tangible things—a bed of sweet peas staked in a garden border, a child on a swing, a certain slant of winter light. A basket of kittens.
There was a dismayingly large cache of e-mails that Graham had saved from Maggie Louden, little electronic billet-doux of the
“My darling, what we have is so wonderful”
type. Tatiana read, in a drawling vampiric accent that rendered the sentiments ludicrous,
“Have you talked about the divorce with Gloria yet? You
promised
you would talk to her this weekend.”
Attached to one of the e-mails was a folder of photographs, some of Graham and Maggie, although mostly of Maggie alone, taken by Graham, presumably. Gloria couldn’t remember the last time that Graham had taken her photograph.
“Voddabitch,” Gloria said.
He had taken Maggie to York Races for Ladies Day, an outing that Gloria herself had suggested to Graham as something they might do together,
“a day out.”
Maggie and Graham had stayed at Middlethorpe Hall
(“Really lovely, darling.You are a god”)
. He had bought her a pink diamond—
“Gorgeous,gorgeous,gorgeous.It’s
huge!
(Like you!) Someone’s going to get a treat tonight!”
His e-mails to her tended to be more prosaic.
“The new ‘Ivan-hoe’ is going to be a four-bedroom terrace, integral garage, we’re trying to nail down sales before construction begins. Make a point of the laundry room. It’s a big selling point.”
Everything was business, even love.
Gloria couldn’t have a pink sink, but his mistress could have a pink diamond as big as the Balmoral. It seemed a shame now that Graham’s imminent demise might rob Gloria of the satisfaction of watching him squirm in the divorce courts. Half his income, half his business.
“Half of nothing, Gloria,” Tatiana said to her. “Remember, Proceeds of Crime Act 2002.”
Somehow Gloria wasn’t surprised that Tatiana was up to date with the criminal justice system.
“It’s all there, Gloria,”Tatiana said, and she was right, it was— the false accounting, the illegal bank transfers, the shell companies, the tax evasion. The money that Graham had passed through Hatter Homes’ accounts, not just for himself but for other people— the man was a money launderer for hire, washing and scrubbing away at the filthy lucre as if it were a vocation. There were codes and passwords for bank accounts in this country and in Jersey, in the Caymans, in Switzerland. The breadth and sprawl of it all was astounding. He owned the whole world.
“He owns Favors?” Gloria asked, squinting at the screen. “With Murdo?”
“Everything is business, Gloria. Business and lies. You’re old woman, you should know that by now. Move,” she commanded. Gloria shifted out of her seat, and Tatiana took over at the computer, her hands poised above the keyboard like those of a virtu-oso pianist about to commit the performance of her career.
Gloria was intrigued. “What exactly are you doing? Are you transferring money? Into the housekeeping account?” she added hopefully.
“If I tell you, I have to kill you,” Tatiana said. She was like a comedy Russian. Gloria wondered if she really
was
Russian. There was no reason why she should be who she said she was. No rea-son why anyone should be who they said they were. People believed whatever they were told. They believed Graham was in Thurso. In the future, the future that was just beyond the path edged with antirrhinums and salvias, Gloria could be whoever she wanted to be.
Tatiana burst out laughing, slapped Gloria on the arm (quite hard), and said, “Just joking, Gloria. I’m moving it into one of the Swiss accounts. Take fraud cops forever to find it, long after other accounts are frozen, and by then you and me”—she snapped her fingers in the air—“pouf! We are gone.”
“But how will we get the money out?” Gloria puzzled.
“Gloria, you are such
idyot!
It’s Hatter Homes’ account, you’re director of company, you can take what you want out. You’re im-portant
businesswoman
.You better phone them and tell them we’re coming because this is
lot
of money. Don’t worry, Gloria. remember, I work in
bank
.”
T
he doorbell rang. It was Pam.
“This isn’t really a good time,” Gloria said.
“Your security gates are wide-open,” Pam said, walking into the hallway. “Anyone could walk in. I’m just on my way back from the Book Festival.” She made her way, without being invited, into the living room and sat on the peach-damask sofa. Gloria followed, wondering how to get rid of her, perhaps she could just snap her fingers and
pouf!
—she would be gone.
“I have to say, you didn’t miss much,” Pam said. “As events go it was very unsatisfactory, it managed to be both argumentative and lackluster at the same time. And I wasn’t convinced by the filled rolls. Dougal Tarvit was all right, but as for Alex Blake, what a disappointment.”
“Oh?”
“So short. Definitely something suspicious about him. I’m surprised the police don’t have him in custody yet for Richard Mott’s murder.”
“Oh?”
“I bought you a signed copy.”
“Oh?”
“Stop saying ‘oh,’ Gloria, you sound like a walking zero. Are you going to put the kettle on? I hear poor old Graham got stuck in Thurso.”
The doorbell rang again. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Gloria said.
“
I
nspector Brodie,” the man said, stepping forward and shaking her hand.
“An inspector calls,” Gloria said. She presumed he was a fraud officer, but didn’t they hunt in packs? He followed her into the living room. She wished she had kept him on the doorstep, like a Jehovah’s Witness. All these unwanted visitors were an unwelcome distraction from the international banking fraud that Tatiana was committing in the kitchen, overseen by Gloria’s red KitchenAid and Delia Smith’s
Complete Cookery Course
.
“Tea?” Gloria offered politely, trying to remember if he had shown her any ID. Where was his warrant card? He was saying something about road rage when Tatiana glided in from the kitchen and said, “Hello, everybody,” like a poor actress in a farce.
“Oh,” Pam said.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” the policeman said to Ta-tiana. “People will begin to talk.”
Whatever else might have been said after that was never spoken because Graham’s golem chose that moment to put in the French windows with a baseball bat, and Pam started screaming as if she were trying to summon all the demons out of hell, and she didn’t stop screaming until the stranger appeared in the garden and shot the golem in the heart.
J
ackson hadn’t intended to impersonate a policeman, yet when the door was opened and he said, “Mrs. Hatter?” and she said, “Yes,” it came out automatically. It had seemed the most natural thing in the world to say “Inspector Brodie.”
Gloria Hatter was dressed in a red tracksuit that reminded him, in a distant pocket of his memory, of Jimmy Savile on
Jim’ll Fix It
. Luckily she wasn’t wearing a medallion or smoking a cigar. She seemed to think he was with the fraud squad, and he didn’t go out of his way to disabuse her of this notion.
When he mentioned the Honda and the road-rage incident, she said, “I didn’t see anything,” and he said, “You were there as well?” in disbelief. A vaguely familiar woman with orange hair was sitting on the sofa, holding a copy of Martin’s latest book,
The Mon-key Puzzle Tree
. That detail alone sent Jackson’s brain spinning. Boxes within boxes, dolls within dolls, worlds within worlds. Everything was connected. Everything in the whole world.
The phone rang and an answering machine somewhere kicked in. A woman’s hysterical voice that could have been announcing an alien invasion shouted,
“Gloria! It’s Christine! They’re here.They’re taking the computers!”
Jackson was distracted from this message by Tatiana’s entrance. He thought,
This is too much, it really is
. When Honda Man, complete with baseball bat, appeared at the French windows like a character in a horror movie and created air where previously there had been glass, Jackson began to wonder if he was on some new kind of reality television show, a cross between
Candid Camera
and a murder-mystery weekend. He half-expected a presenter to leap out from behind the sofa in Gloria Hatter’s living room and shout, “Surprise! Jackson Brodie, you
thought
you found a corpse in the River Forth, you
thought
you witnessed a man being assaulted with a baseball bat, you
thought
this little Russian lady here whispered clues in your ear (Yes! She doubled as that mysterious corpse), but no, it was all a fiction. Jackson Brodie, you are live in front of an audience of millions. Welcome to the future.”
They were all here, Tatiana, Honda Man, the only person missing was Martin. But, lo, he had thought too soon because here came Martin, striding with more purpose than hitherto across Gloria Hatter’s admirably well-kept lawns.
“And also starring Martin Canning as the deceptively bumbling writer!”
Tatiana shouted something in Russian that sounded like a curse, while Gloria Hatter, less dramatically, said, “Terry, what on earth do you think you’re doing?”
