Her father, Tatiana volunteered suddenly, had been a "great clown." (So perhaps it did explain her nom de guerre in some way.) In the West, she said, they thought clowns were "slapstick fools," but in Russia they were "existential artists." She drooped with a sudden Slavic melancholy and offered Gloria a piece of gum, which Gloria declined.

"So not funny, then?" Gloria said, taking five hundred pounds from an ATM in the hospital corridor. Gloria had been removing five hundred pounds a day from an ATM for the last six months. She kept the money in a black plastic garbage bag in her wardrobe. Seventy-two thousand so far in twenty-pound notes. It took up a surprisingly small amount of room. Gloria wondered how much space a million would occupy. Gloria liked cash, it was tangible, it didn't pretend to be something else. Graham also liked cash. Graham liked cash a little too much, vast amounts of it swilled around in the Hatter Homes' accounts and came out as clean as new white linen. Graham had eschewed the old-fashioned way-- launderettes and sunbed shops--that his friend Murdo still adhered to. Pam seemed blissfully unaware that the Jean Muir and Ballantyne cashmere that clothed her back were bought with funny money. Ignorance was not innocence.

Gloria divided the money from the ATM between herself and Tatiana. They had, after all, both earned Graham's money in their own ways. In the seventies, women had marched for "Wages for Housework." Wages for sex seemed to make more sense. Housework had to be done whether you liked it or not, but sex was optional.

"Oh, no, I don't have sex with them," Tatiana said. She laughed as if this were the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard. "I'm not an idyot, Gloria."

"But you charge money?"

"Sure. It's business. Everything is business." Tatiana rubbed her thumb and forefinger together in the universal language of money.

"So, what do they pay you for . . . exactly?"

"Slapped around. Tied up. Beaten. Given orders, made to do things."

"What kind of things?"

"You know."

"No, I can't even begin to imagine."

"Lick my boots, crawl on floor, eat like dog."

"Nothing useful, then, like hoovering?"

Who knew--all these years Gloria could have been spanking Graham and making him eat like a dog? And be paid for it!

"In Russia I worked in bank," Tatiana said darkly, as if a bank were the most dangerous place in the world to work. "In Russia I was hungry." She had very mobile features, Gloria noticed, and she wondered if it had anything to do with her clowning father.

In exchange for the cash, from somewhere inside the confines of her bra, Tatiana produced a little pink card and wrote on the back of it a mobile number and "Ask for Jojo." She handed the card to Gloria. On the front, it was engraved in black lettering with FA-VORS--WE DO WHAT YOU WANT US TO DO! The exclamation point gave the impression that Favors would provide entertainers and balloons for a child's party. Again with the clowns, Gloria thought. She had seen that logo somewhere, surely. Wasn't "Favors" a cleaning agency? Gloria had noticed their pink vans around her neighborhood, and Pam had used them when her own cleaner had a bladder prolapse last year. Gloria had always done her own cleaning, she liked cleaning. It filled in the hours in a useful way.

"Yeah, sure." Tatiana shrugged. "They'll do cleaning if that's what you want." "Cleaning" seemed to take on a whole new meaning in Tatiana's lugubrious accent, as if it were, paradoxically, a filthy (if not slightly macabre) activity.

The card was still warm from nestling next to Tatiana's breasts, and Gloria was reminded of collecting eggs from beneath the chickens her mother kept in the back garden, long after war and necessity were done with. Tatiana tucked the money inside her bra. Gloria also frequently carried valuables within the armor of her underwear in the belief that even the boldest mugger was unlikely to brave the rampart of her postmenopausal 42EE Triumph "Doreen."

They walked together to the entrance of the shopping mall / hospital, and on the way Gloria bought a pint of milk, a book of stamps, and a magazine from a shop. She wouldn't have been surprised to find a car wash out the back somewhere.

The entrance was a huge air lock at the front of the building where people hung around, using their mobiles, waiting for taxis and lifts, or getting a break from whatever birth or death or routine mundanity had brought them here. A couple of patients in dressing gowns and slippers stared glumly through the rain-spotted glass at the outside world. On the other side of the glass, the smokers stared back inside, equally glum.

It felt cold outside after the hothouse atmosphere of the hospital. Tatiana shivered, and Gloria offered her own three-quarter-length green Dannimac. It made Gloria look like the clone of every other middle-aged woman, but on Tatiana the coat gained a strange un-Dannimac-like glamour. She snapped gum and smoked a cigarette while she made a call on her mobile, speaking very quickly in Russian. Gloria felt a little tug of admiration. Tatiana was so much more interesting than her own daughter.

"This was a surprise for you," Tatiana said when she finished the call.

"Well, yes," Gloria agreed, "you could say that. I always imagined him going on the golf course. Not that he's actually gone yet, of course."

Tatiana patted her on the shoulder and said, "Don't worry, Gloria. He will soon."

"You think?"

Tatiana gazed off into the distance like a soothsayer and said, "Trust me." Then she gave another little shiver that seemed to have nothing to do with the weather and said, "Now I have to go." She slipped off Gloria's Dannimac in an elegant, if rather theatrical, way that made Gloria wonder if she had trained as a ballet dancer, but Tatiana shook her head and, handing back the coat, said, "Trapeze."

The last Gloria saw of Tatiana, she was getting into a car with blacked-out windows that had pulled up stealthily at the curb. For a minute Gloria thought it was Graham's car, but then she remembered where he was.

Chapter 9

The nurse with the nice smile sought Martin out in the waiting room. She sat down next to him, and for a moment Martin thought that she was going to tell him that Paul Bradley had died. Would he have to arrange the funeral now that he was somehow responsible for him?

"He's going to be a little while yet," she said. "We're just waiting on the doctor coming back, then he'll probably be discharged."

"Discharged?" Martin was astonished, he remembered Paul Bradley in the ambulance, blood from his head staining the baby-blanket shroud he was wrapped in. He still thought of him as someone who was wrestling with oblivion.

"The head wound's only superficial, there's no fracture. There's no reason he can't go home as long as you can be there to keep an eye on him for the rest of the night. We ask that when people have been unconscious, no matter how briefly."

She was still smiling at him, so he said, "Right. Okay. No problem. Thank you--?"

"Sarah."

"Sarah. Thank you, Sarah." She seemed very young and small, the epitome of neatness, her blond hair smoothed into the kind of tight bun that ballerinas wore.

"He said you were a hero," she said.

"He was wrong."

Sarah smiled, but he wasn't sure at what. She cocked her head to one side, a sparrow of a girl. "You look familiar," she said.

"Do I?" He knew he had a forgettable face. He was a forgettable person, a perpetual disappointment to people when he met them in the flesh.

"Oh, you're so short!" one woman declared during question time after a reading last year. "Isn't he?" she said, turning to the rest of the audience for validation, which was quick in forthcoming, everyone nodding and smiling at him as if he had just turned from man to boy in front of their eyes. He was five foot eight, hardly a midget.

Did he write like a short man? How did short men write? He had never had a photograph on his jackets, and he suspected it was because his publishers didn't think it would help sell the books. "Oh, no," Melanie said, "it's to make you more mysterious." For his most recent book, they had changed their minds, sending up a celebrated photographer to try to capture something "more atmospheric." ("Sex him up" was the actual phrase, used on an e-mail that had been mistakenly forwarded to Martin. Or at least he hoped it was a mistake.) The photographer, a woman, had suggested Blackford Pond to him with the aim of taking moody black-and-white shots beneath winter trees. "Think of something really sad," she instructed him while mothers with small children in tow, there to feed the ducks and swans, regarded them with open curiosity. Martin couldn't do sad-to-order, sadness was a random visual spring tapped by accident--RSPCA adverts showing dead kittens, old documentary shots of piles of spectacles and suitcases, Haydn's Second Cello Concerto. The maudlin, the terrible, and the sublime all producing the same watery reaction in him.

"Something in your own life," the celebrity photographer cajoled. "How did it feel when you left the priesthood, for example? That must have been difficult." And Martin, uncharacteristically rebellious, said, "I'm not doing this."

"Too difficult for you?" the photographer said, nodding and making a tortuously sympathetic face. In the end the photograph made him look like a polite suburban serial killer, and the book was published, as usual, without a photograph on the jacket.

"You need more presence, Martin," Melanie said. "It's my job to tell you these things," she added. He frowned and said, "Is it?" The opposite of presence was absence. A forgettable man with a forgettable name. An absence rather than a presence in the world.

"No, really," Sarah insisted, "I'm sure I've seen you somewhere. What do you do for a living?"

"I'm a writer." He immediately regretted saying it. For one thing it always sounded as if he were showing off (and yet there was nothing about being a writer per se that was cause for hubris). And it was a dead-end conversation that always followed the same inevitable path: "Really? You're a writer? What do you write?""Novels.""What kind of novels?""Crime novels.""Really? Where do you get your ideas from?" The last one seemed to Martin to be a huge neuroscientific and existential question quite beyond his competency to answer, yet he was asked it all the time. "Oh, you know," he said vaguely these days, "here and there." ("You think too much, Martin," his Chinese acupuncturist, Ming Chen, said, "but not in a good way.")

"Really?" Sarah said, her untainted features struggling to imagine what it meant to be a "writer." For some reason people thought it was a glamorous profession, but Martin couldn't find anything glamorous about sitting in a room on your own, day after day, trying not to go mad.

"Soft-boiled crime," Martin said, "you know, nothing too nasty or gory. Sort of Miss Marple meets Dr. Finlay," he added, conscious of how apologetic he sounded. He wondered if she'd heard of either. Probably not. "The central character is named Nina Riley," he felt compelled to continue. "She inherited a detective agency from her uncle." How stupid it sounded. Stupid and crass.

The policewomen from earlier appeared in the waiting room. When they saw Martin, the first one exclaimed, "There you are! We need to take a statement from you. We've been looking everywhere for you."

"I've been here all the time," Martin said.

"I bet you can't tell what he does for a living," Sarah said to the policewomen. Both women stared at him gravely for a moment before the second one said, "Don't know. Give up."

"He's a writer," Sarah declared triumphantly.

"Never," the first one said.

The second policewoman shook her head in amazement and said, "I've always wondered about writers. Where do you get your ideas from?"

Martin went for a walk around the hospital, taking Paul Bradley's bag with him. It was beginning to feel like his own. He went to the shop and looked at the newspapers. He went to the cafe and had a cup of a tea, working his way through the loose change in his pocket. He wondered if it was possible to live in the hospital without anyone noticing you were there. The place had everything you needed, really--food, warmth, bathrooms, beds, reading material. Someone had left a Scotsman on the table. He made a listless start on the Derek Allen crossword. "First Scotsman on the road." Six letters. "Tarmac."

While he was drinking his tea, he heard an accent--a girl's or a woman's--drifting across the clatter and chatter of the cafe. Russian, but when he looked around he couldn't identify to whom it belonged. A Russian woman manifesting unexpectedly in the Royal Infirmary to castigate him, to bring him to justice. Maybe he was hallucinating. He tried to concentrate on the black-and-white squares, he wasn't very good at crosswords. "Grebe reared in northern Scandinavian city." Six letters. He liked anagrams best. Little rearrangements. "Bergen."

"Idyot," he was sure he heard the invisible Russian girl say. There was a cafe in St. Petersburg called the Idiot. He had been there with Irina and eaten borscht that was the exact color of the blazer he'd had to wear every day as a schoolboy. For a man wrestling with an immoral, uncaring universe, Dostoyevsky seemed to have spent a lot of time in cafes, every other one in St. Petersburg claimed him as a customer. "Jack, say, and little Arthur going to a capital city." Seven letters. "Jakarta." He took his spectacles off and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

It had been on one of those packages they advertised in the travel pages of the papers on a Saturday. "See the Northern Lights--Five-Day Cruise off the Coast of Norway," "The Wonders of Prague," "Beautiful Bordeaux--Wine Tasting for the Beginner," "Autumn on Lake Como." It offered a safe way to travel (the coward's way), everything was organized for you so that all you had to do was turn up with your passport. Middle-class, middle-aged, middle England. And middle Scotland, of course. Safety in numbers, in the herd.

Last year it had been "The Magic of Russia--Five Nights in St. Petersburg," a city Martin had always wanted to visit. The city of Peter the Great, of Dostoyevsky and Diaghilev, the setting for Tchaikovsky's last years and for Nabokov's first. The storming of the Winter Palace, Lenin arriving at the Finland Station, Shostakovich broadcasting his Seventh Symphony live in August 1942 in the middle of the siege--it was hard to believe one place could be so heady with history. (Why hadn't he done history at university instead of religious studies? There was more passion in history, more spiritual truth in human actions than in faith.) He thought how much he would like to write a novel set in St. Petersburg, a real novel--not a Nina Riley. And anyway, in the late forties Nina would have found it difficult to travel to St. Petersburg--Leningrad, as it still was then. Perhaps she could have crossed secretly from Sweden into Finland and then smuggled herself over the border, or crossed the Baltic on a small craft (she was handy with a skiff).

Martin had, as usual, effortlessly acquired an unwanted holiday companion--a man who had latched on to him in the departure lounge and had hardly left his side from then on. He was a retired grocer from Cirencester who introduced himself to Martin by telling him that he had terminal cancer and St. Petersburg was on his list of "things to do before I die."

Their hotel had been advertised as "one of the best tourist hotels," and Martin wondered if "tourist hotel" was Russian for a featureless concrete block from the Soviet era, containing endless identical corridors and serving up execrable food. In the guidebook he had been studying prior to departure, there were photographs of the interiors of the Astoria and the Grand Hotel Europe, places that seemed redolent with luxury and pre-Bolshevik decadence. His own hotel, on the other hand, had rooms that were like shoe boxes. He was not alone in his shoebox cell, however. The first night he was there, he got up to go to the bathroom and almost stood on a cockroach pasturing on his bedroom carpet. And there was construction going on, the hotel seemed to be simultaneously being demolished and rebuilt. Men and women on scaffolding--no safety gear apparent anywhere, he noticed. A fine layer of concrete dust everywhere. The room was on the seventh floor, and the first morning Martin had opened the curtains and found two middle-aged women standing on scaffolding outside the window, head scarves on their heads and tools in their hands.

The room was made bearable by the view--the sweep of the Neva ornamented by the scroll of the Winter Palace, as iconic a view as Venice approached across the lagoon. From his window he could see the Aurora berthed opposite--"The Aurora!" he ex-claimed excitedly, next morning at breakfast to the dying grocer. "Fired the opening shot in the revolution," he added when the dying grocer looked at him blankly.

The first day it was all churches, and they had trailed dutifully at the heels of their guide, Mariya, around the Kazan Cathedral, St. Isaac's Cathedral, the Church of Our Savior on the Spilled Blood, the Peter and Paul Cathedral ("Where our czars are buried," Mariya announced proudly, as if Communism had never happened).

"You must be enjoying this," the grocer said to Martin during a brief break for lunch in a place that reminded Martin of a school cafeteria, except where smoking was encouraged. "You being a religious man and everything."

"No," Martin said, not for the first time, "religious studies teacher. That doesn't necessarily make me religious."

"So you teach something you don't believe in?" the dying grocer asked, becoming suddenly quite belligerent. Dying seemed to have made the man rectitudinous. Or perhaps he had always been that way.

"No, yes, no," Martin said. This conversation was made awkward by the fact that Martin was still pretending to be a religious studies teacher, even though it was more than seven years since he had been inside a school. He was reluctant to say he was a writer and be stuck with that delimitation for the whole five days, knowing the questions it would provoke and knowing there would be nowhere to hide. One of their party, sitting across the aisle from Martin on the plane out, had been reading The Forbidden Stag, the second Nina Riley mystery. Martin wanted to say--casually--"Good book?" but couldn't countenance the response, more likely to be "Load of crap" than "This is a fantastic book, you should read it!"

Martin gave up protesting his lack of religion to the grocer because the man was dying, after all, and for all Martin knew faith might be the only thing that was keeping him going, that and ticking things off on his list. Martin didn't think it was a good idea to have a list, it meant that when you got to the last item, the only thing left to do was die. Or perhaps that was the last item on the list.

On the way back from lunch, walking along a canal on a side street toward yet another church, they passed a sign, a wooden advertising board on the pavement, announcing, ST. PETERSBURG BRIDES--COME INSIDE. Some of the party sniggered when they noticed it, and the grocer, who was clearly stuck to Martin's side until he actually died, said, "We all know what that means."

"Met horrid accident with lobster dish." Nine letters. "Thermidor."

Martin felt a little flush of guilt. He had been on the Internet. He had considered buying a bride (because, let's face it, he was incapable of getting one for free). When he first became successful, he thought that it might make him more attractive to women, that he would be able to borrow some charisma from his more interesting alter ego, Alex Blake. It had made no difference, he obviously carried an aura of untouchability with him. He was the kind of person who, at parties, ended up in the kitchen washing glasses. "It's as if you're asexual, Martin," one girl had told him, thinking she was being helpful in some way.

If there'd been a site that advertised "Old-Fashioned British Brides (but not like your mother)," he might have signed up, but there wasn't, so first he had looked at the Thai brides ("petite, sexy, attentive, affectionate, compliant"), but the very idea had seemed so sleazy. He'd seen one such couple a few months before, in John Lewis--an ugly, overweight middle-aged man and, on his arm, this beautiful, tiny girl, smiling and laughing at him as if he were some kind of god. People looking at them, knowing. She was just like the ones on the Internet sites--vulnerable and small, like a child. He'd felt sick, as if he were on a pornography site. He would rather die than go on one of those--for one thing he was terrified they were monitored and that he would take one quick curious peek at "Cum Inside" or "Sexy Pics" and the next thing there would be a hammering on the door and the police would break it down and rush in and arrest him. He would have been similarly mortified to buy anything off the top shelf of a newsagent. He knew (because this was part of his karma too) that he would take a magazine to the counter, and the girl (because it would be a girl) would shout out to the manager, "How much is Big Tits?" Or if he had something sent in the post it would fall out of its wrapper just as the postman handed it to him on the doorstep--undoubtedly at the moment that a vicar, an old lady, and a small child passed by. "Whinge may have upset novelist." Nine letters. "Hemingway."

The Russian brides on the Internet didn't look childlike, however, and they didn't even look particularly compliant. The Lyudmilas and Svetlanas and Lenas looked like women, women who knew what they were doing (selling themselves, let's face it). They had a startling range of attributes and talents, they liked "disco" as well as "classical," they went to museums and parks, they read newspapers and novels, they kept fit and were fluent in several languages, they were accountants and economists, they were "serious, kind, purposeful, and elegant," they were looking for a "decent man, pleasant dialogue, or romanticism." It was hard to believe that their poignant CVs could translate into living, breathing women, yet here they were--the Lyudmilas and Svetlanas and Lenas, or their equivalent, behind a large wooden door on the (rather frightening) streets of St. Petersburg rather than simply floating in virtual space. The idea made his insides flutter with terror. He recognized the feeling, it wasn't desire, it was temptation. He could have the thing he wanted, he could buy a wife. He didn't think they were actually in the building, of course, corralled inside its peeling walls. But they were close. In the city. Waiting.

Martin had an ideal woman. Not Nina Riley, not a bought bride looking for economic security or a passport. No, his ideal woman came from the past--an old-fashioned Home Counties type of wife, a young widow who had lost her fighter-pilot husband to the Battle of Britain and who now struggled bravely on, bringing up her child alone. "Daddy died, darling, he was handsome and brave and fought to stay alive for you, but in the end he had to leave us." This child, a rather serious boy named Peter or David, wore sleeveless Fair Isle jerseys over gray shirts. He had brilliantined hair and scraped knees and liked nothing better than to sit in the evening, making aircraft kits with Martin. ("This is like the one Daddy flew in, isn't it?") Martin didn't mind being second best to the Spitfire pilot (Roly or Jim), a man who had sliced through the blue, blue skies above England like a swallow. Martin knew that the woman was grateful to him for picking up the pieces of a bereaved life, and she would never leave him.

Occasionally she was named Martha, and very infrequently she went by the name Abigail (in the imaginary life identities were less fixed), but usually she was nameless. To assign a name was to make her real. To make her real was to render her impossible.

It was best to keep women locked inside your imagination. When they escaped into the chaotic mess that was the real world, they became unstable, unfriendly, ultimately terrifying. They created incidents. He felt suddenly queasy. "Something used in carrying out suspended sentences." Five letters.

Chapter 10

Jackson climbed aboard the 41 bus on the Mound and thought, okay, if she wanted him to take a bus, he would take a bus. The 41 covered a long route that ended up at Cramond. He knew "Cramond" as a hymn tune, not a place. Or was it "Crimond"? So many things he didn't know. The Lord is my shepherd. Was he? It seemed unlikely somehow.

An old woman waiting at the bus stop with him said, "Oh, it's very nice out at Cramond, you can go to Cramond Island from there. You'll like it." He believed her, years of experience had taught Jackson that old women tended to tell the truth.

He sat on the top deck, at the front, and felt for a moment like a child again--some boyhood memory of sitting up there next to his big sister as a treat. Those were the days when the top deck was for smokers. And a time when life was painfully simple. He often thought about his dead sister, but she was usually an image in isolation (the idea of his sister). He rarely had a sharply focused picture of something that had actually occurred, and this sudden, unexpected memory of sitting next to Niamh on the bus--the smell of her violet cologne, the rustle of her petticoat, the feel of his arm resting next to hers--tied a tight knot in his heart.

The old woman was right, it was nice out at Cramond. It was a satellite of Edinburgh but it seemed like a village. He walked past expensive houses, past a nice old church, down to the harbor, where swans were swimming idly. The smell of coffee and fried food wafting from the kitchen of the Cramond Inn mixed with the salty scents of the estuary. He had been expecting to catch some kind of ferry out to the island, but now he could see that it was easily reachable along a short causeway of rocks. He didn't need a tide table to tell that the sea was shrinking away from the rocky spine of this causeway. The air was still damp from this morning's rain, but the sun had put in an unexpected and welcome appearance, making the newly washed sand and shingle glitter. A host of different types of waders and gulls was busy beachcombing among the rocks. Exercise and fresh air would be just the ticket, as Julia would have said. He needed to blow away the stale thoughts that had accumulated in his brain, find the old Jackson that he seemed to have lost sight of. He set out along the causeway.

He passed a couple on their way back, retired middle-class types in Peter Storm jackets, binoculars slung around their necks, yomping briskly back to shore, their breezy "Good afternoons" ringing in Jackson's ears. "Tide turning!" the female half of the pair added cheerfully. Jackson nodded agreement.

Bird-watchers, he supposed. What were they called? Twitchers. God knows why. He'd never really seen the attraction of watching birds, they were nice enough things in themselves, but watching them was a bit like trainspotting. Jackson had never felt that autistic (mainly) male urge to collect and collate.

The sun disappeared almost as soon as he reached the island, rendering the atmosphere of the place oddly oppressive. Occasionally he stumbled across the relics of wartime fortifications, ugly pieces of concrete that gave the place a bleak, besieged air. Seagulls swooped and screeched threateningly overhead, defending their territory. It was much smaller than he had expected, it took him hardly any time to walk round the whole island. He encountered no one else, something he was rather glad of. He didn't like to think what kind of weirdos might be lurking around in a place like this. Obviously he didn't include himself in the weirdo category. Despite not seeing anyone, he had an odd feeling-- not one he was willing to give any daylight credence to--of being watched. A little frisson of paranoia, nothing more. He wasn't about to start getting fanciful, but when a swollen purple cloud appeared from the direction of the sea and made an inexorable progress up the Forth, it seemed like a welcome sign that it was time to go back.

He checked his watch. Four o'clock--teatime on Planet Julia. He remembered a warm, lazy afternoon they had spent together last summer in the Orchard Tea Rooms at Grantchester, the two of them stretched out on deck chairs beneath the trees, replete with afternoon tea. They had been on a brief, rather uncomfortable visit to Julia's sister, who still lived in Cambridge and who had declined to join them on their "jaunt." Julia's word. Julia's vocabulary was "chock-full" of strangely archaic words--"spiffing," "crumbs," "jeepers"--that seemed to have originated in some prewar girls' annual rather than in Julia's own life. For Jackson, words were functional, they helped you get to places and explain things. For Julia, they were freighted with inexplicable emotion.

"Afternoon tea" itself, of course, was one of Julia's all-time favorite phrases ("Good enough words on their own, but together, perfect"). "Afternoon tea" usually trailed a few excessive adjectives in its wake--"scrumptious," "yummy," "heavenly."

"Warm bakery basket" was another of her favorites, as were (mysteriously) "Autumn equinox" and "lamp black." Certain words, she said, made her toes "positively curl with happiness"-- "rum," "vulgar," "blanchisserie," "hazard," "perfidious," "treasure," "divertimenti." Certain scraps and lines of poetry--"Of his bones are coral made" and "They flee from me that sometime did me seek"-- sent her into sentimental rapture. The "Hallelujah Chorus" made her sob, as did Lassie, Come Home (the whole film, title to closing credits). Jackson sighed, Jackson Brodie, the all-time winner of the Mr. and Mrs. game show.

His phone buzzed like a trapped bee in his pocket. He peered at the screen--having an eye test would be something useful he could do while he was up here with nothing else to do. A text message from Julia read, "How r u? comp 4 r mott 2nite at our box! Luv Julia xxxxxxxxxxxx." Jackson had no idea what the text meant, but he felt a surge of affection when he thought of Julia laboriously tapping in all those Xs.

He was about to set off back when his eye was caught by something on the rocks, below the remains of a concrete lookout. For a second he thought it was a bundle of clothing that had been dropped there, hoped it was a bundle of clothing, but it didn't take him more than a skipped heartbeat to know it was a body that had been cast up by the tide. Jetsam, or was it flotsam?

A young woman, jeans and a vest top, bare feet, long hair. The policeman in him automatically thought, Hundred and twenty pounds, five foot six, although the height was a guess, as she was lying in a fetal position with her legs drawn up as if she'd gone to sleep on the rocks. If she'd been alive, he would have automatically thought, What a great body, but in death this judgment was translated into a lovely figure--aesthetic and asexual, as if he were contemplating the cold, marble limbs of a statue in the Louvre.

Drowned? Fresh, not a "floater" who had gone down and come back up again as a nightmare of slippery, bloated flesh. He was glad she wasn't naked. Naked would immediately have meant something different. Jackson scrambled down the grass and onto rocks that were slippery with seaweed and barnacles. Nothing on the body that he could see, no ligature marks around the neck, her skull looked intact. No needle tracks, no tattoos, no birthmarks, no scars, she was a blank canvas, just tiny gold crucifixes on her ears. Her green eyes--half-open--were filmy with death and as blank as the aforesaid statue.

He could see some kind of card, like a business card, poking out from the cup of her bra. It was pale pink, an extra patch of wrinkled wet skin. He tweezed it out with his fingers. In black letters it said, favors--we do what you want us to do! and a phone number, a mobile. A prostitute? A lap dancer? Or maybe "Favors" was just a helpful charity that went around doing old ladies' shopping. Yeah, that would be right, Jackson thought cynically.

He touched her cheek, he wasn't sure why, she was clearly dead, perhaps he wanted her to feel a friendly touch. He wanted her to know, between dying before her time and being sliced open by the pathologist's scalpel, that someone had felt for her predicament. A wave washed over both the girl and Jackson's boots. She was beached below the tidemark, and he was going to have to haul her to higher ground. Another wave.The rising waters were going to take her back out to sea if he didn't do something fast. The rising waters? When he stood up and looked back toward the causeway, he realized that the rock pools were filling up with seawater and the sand and shingle were almost obliterated. "Tide turning," the twitcher woman had said. Not going out as he had thought but coming in. Shit.

Another wave came, lapping at Jackson's boots. He was going to be trapped in this place if he didn't get a move on. He took out his mobile and dialed 999, but there was only the squeaky electronic noise that indicated no signal. He remembered the camera in his pocket, at least he'd be able to give the police a record of her in situ before he moved her. He took a quick shot, not the usual holiday snap of a tourist, but then he had to abandon the idea of photographing anything because the water was rising so fast now that he had to wade into the water to grab hold of her. Just as he did, however, a wave bigger than all the ones that had gone before caught her, lifted her up, and rolled her away. Oh bugger, Jackson thought. He flung the camera down, threw off his jacket, and launched himself into the freezing gray water. The cold of the water was astonishing, the swell more powerful than it looked. Jackson didn't think that any of his Celtic ancestors had been the seafaring sort. He was a good swimmer, but water wasn't his element, he liked earth, the ground under his feet.

He had put a swimming pool in the garden of his house in France. It was tiled with little azure mosaics, and in summer the sun on the water was so dazzling that you could barely look at it. When he lived in Cambridge he used to go for a run every morning, but since moving to France it had seemed a ridiculous thing to do. No one ran in rural France. They drank. If you didn't drink you weren't part of the social fabric. The French seemed able to down liters of alcohol without facing any consequence whereas Jackson felt the consequences almost every morning. So he swam in his turquoise-mosaic swimming pool, up and down, up and down, lap after lap, to swim off the alcohol, the boredom.

His swimming pool bore no relation to the hostile environment of the Forth in August. "Sagittarius," Julia said. "You're a fire sign, water is your enemy." Did she believe crap like that? "Watch out for Pisceans," she told him. "Pisces" was the Latin for "fish." At home in France his swimming pool was a piscine. Julia was an Aries, another fire sign, not ideal, she said. Fighting fire with fire. What would happen to them, would they just burn up? Become cold ashes?

He managed to grab the dead woman beneath the shoulders, lifesaving style, but she was a deadweight, in all ways. A relentless succession of waves began to batter them both. Jackson took in a mouthful of brackish seawater that left him choking. He tried to tread water while he worked out the best way of getting them both out of the sea, but the waves kept coming. Jackson had saved people from drowning, once on duty, once off. And once, on a holiday weekend in Whitby with Josie and Marlee, he had watched as a man jumped into the sea off the pier after his dog-- a bouncy little terrier that had been so excited it had simply raced off the edge and into the sea below, while all around people screamed in horror. The man got into difficulties immediately, and another two men dived in after him. They were brothers, both in their thirties, married with five children between them. Only the dog came out of the water alive. Jackson would have jumped in too, tried to rescue the lot of them, but the anchor of a hysterical four-year-old Marlee around his leg had prevented him. The inshore lifeboat was on its way by then, he told himself afterward, but to this day he hadn't forgiven himself, and if he could have put the clock back he would have shaken Marlee off and jumped in. It wasn't heroism, it was a kind of necessity. Maybe that was a Catholic thing too.

He went under, still hanging on to the leaden girl. Somewhere in his head he could hear Marlee screaming, "Daddeee!" and the old woman at the bus stop saying, "It's very nice out at Cramond... you'll like it," and for a glorious second he was back in his swimming pool in France, the warm sun reflecting off the turquoise mosaics. He knew he was being pulled farther away from land all the time, knew that the dead woman was going to drag him under like some lovesick mermaid. Half-woman, half-fish, a Piscean. The words from Binyon's poem came to him: "They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old." He thought how ironic it would be if he drowned trying to save a corpse. He wondered if part of him believed he could still save her. That would be that pesky Catholicism then. He wondered if he was still trying to save the three men who drowned off the Whitby pier. If he wanted to save himself he was going to have to let her go. But he couldn't.

The Little Mermaid--Marlee had loved that when she was little. She would never be little again, she was poised, right on the cusp of her future. If he drowned he would never see her in that future. The briny deep. He didn't know why those words came into his head, they must belong to someone else. Of his bones are coral made. No coral in the Forth. Julia, as brown as a nut, swimming in his pool in France, Julia punting him down the river in Cambridge, Julia the ferrywoman rowing him over the Styx. Marlee had a book called Greek Myths for Children that she had made him read to her. He had learned a lot from that book, his introduction to classicism.

He sent up a prayer to whatever god was on duty that afternoon, sent another one up to Mary, Mother of God, a recessive instinct, the knee-jerk reaction of a lapsed Catholic staring death in the face. Was this how it was going to be? No last rites, no extreme unction? He always imagined he would come round at the end, fall back into the fold, embrace the mother of all churches and have his slate wiped clean, but it looked like that wasn't going to happen now.

He remembered seeing his sister's body being pulled out of the canal--of course--that was why it wasn't his element, why hadn't he realized that before? Nothing to do with star signs. Stella Maris. Our Lady of Sorrows with a starry crown upon her head. Water, water everywhere. He was going down, down to Poseidon's watery realm, the mermaid was taking him home with her.

Chapter 11

Graham had been transferred from the A and E to the ICU. According to the staff in the ICU, there had been no change in his condition. Gloria wondered if he would stay like this forever, as passive as a stone effigy on a sarcophagus. Perhaps he would be moved into some long-term care facility, where he would use up valuable resources for several more decades, depriving more worthy people of kidneys and hips. If he were to die now there might be bits of him that could be recycled in a more socially useful person.

It was quiet in the ICU, the pace of life slower and denser than in the outside world. You could feel how the hospital was a big humming machine, sucking air in and pushing it out, leaking an invisible life--chemicals, static, bugs--through its pores.

Gloria regretted that she wasn't a knitter, she could be producing a useful garment while waiting for Graham to die. The tricoteuse of the ICU. Beryl, Graham's mother, had been a knitter, producing endless matinee sets when Emily and Ewan were babies--hats, jackets, mittens, bootees, leggings--threaded with fiddly ribbons and full of holes for tiny fingers to get caught in. Gloria had dressed her children up like dolls. Emily put the oddly named Xanthia into sensible stretchy white suits and little beanie hats. Gloria hardly ever saw her grandchild. When Emily announced she was pregnant, you would have thought she was the first woman on the planet to ever have a baby. To be honest, Gloria would have been more excited if her daughter had given birth to a puppy rather than the permanently angry Xanthia, who seemed to have inherited Emily's worst traits.

She regarded the steady rise and fall of Graham's chest, the lack of expression on his face. He looked smaller. He was losing his power, shrinking, no longer a demigod. How are the mighty fallen. Graham made a little noise, a susurration as if he were speaking in a dream. His features remained unmoved, however. Gloria stroked his hand with the back of her fingers and felt a twinge of sorrow. Not for Graham the man so much as Graham the boy she had never known, a boy in long flannel shorts and gray shirt and school tie and cap, a boy who knew nothing about ambition and acquisition and call girls. "You stupid bugger, Graham," she said, not entirely without affection.

Where would he go if the machines were turned off ? Drift off into some inner space, a lonely astronaut, abandoned by his ship. It would be funny (well, not funny--astounding) if there was an afterlife. If there was a heaven. Gloria didn't believe in heaven, although she did occasionally worry that it was a place that existed only if you did believe in it. She wondered if people would be so keen on the idea of the next life if it was, say, underground. Or full of people like Pam. And relentlessly, tediously boring, like an everlasting Baptist service but without the occasional excitement of a full immersion. For Graham, presumably, heaven would be a thirty-year-old Macallan, a Montecristo, and, apparently, Miss Whiplash.

He thought he was invincible, but he'd been tagged by death. Graham thought he could buy his way out of anything, but the grim reaper wasn't going to be paid off with Graham's baksheesh. The Grim Reaper, Gloria corrected herself. If anyone deserved capital letters it was surely Death. Gloria would rather like to be the Grim Reaper. She wouldn't necessarily be grim, she suspected she would be quite cheerful ("Come along now, don't make such a fuss").

"They'll never get me"--that's what Graham said. Graham, who always behaved as if he were untouchable, some kind of maverick, an outlaw not subject to the normal rules, crowing with triumph when he fooled the Inland Revenue or Customs and Excise, bypassing health and safety and building regulations, pushing his way through planning, sweetening his path with bribes and backhanders, cruising along in the outside lane at a hundred miles an hour in that bloody great car of his with its blacked-out windows. Why would you need blacked-out windows unless you were up to something nefarious? Gloria didn't like the drawn curtain, the closed door, everything should be on show in broad daylight. If you were doing something you were ashamed of, then you shouldn't be doing it.

Twice he'd managed to wriggle out of being prosecuted for speeding, once for reckless driving, once for being over the limit--thanks to a brother Mason in the courts, no doubt. A few months ago he had been stopped on the A9 going 120 miles per hour while talking on his mobile at the same time as eating a double cheeseburger. Not only that! When he was breathalyzed he was found to be over the limit, yet the case never even got as far as the court, being conveniently dropped on a technicality because Graham hadn't been sent the correct papers. Gloria could imagine him only too well, one hand on the wheel, his phone tucked into the crook of his neck, the grease from the meat dripping down his chin, his breath rank with whiskey. At the time, Gloria had thought that the only thing lacking in this sordid scenario was a woman in the passenger seat fellating him. Now she thought that that had probably been going on as well. Gloria hated the term "blow job" but she rather liked the word "fellatio," it sounded like an Italian musical term--contralto,alto,fellatio--although she found the act itself to be distasteful, in all senses of the word.

When he had got off the latest charge, he celebrated with a noisy, bloated dinner at Prestonfield House with Gloria, Pam, Murdo, and Sheriff Alistair Crichton. It undoubtedly helped if your big golfing pal was a sheriff. Despite having lived in Scotland for four decades, Gloria found that the word "sheriff"did not immediately conjure up the Scottish judiciary. Instead she tended to see tin stars at high noon and Alan Wheatley as the evil Sheriff of Nottingham in the old children's television program Robin Hood. She started to hum the theme tune.

Gloria liked Robin Hood and its simple message--wrong punished, right rewarded, justice restored. Stealing from the rich, giving to the poor, they were basic Communist tenets. Instead of slipping off the bar stool and following Graham, she should have donned a duffle coat and sold the Socialist Worker on wet and windy street corners on Saturday mornings (and still have had sex with so many different men that she would never be able to remember their names, let alone their faces).

They'll never get me. But they would. She thought of the stag at bay on the living room wall, its lips curled back from its teeth in horror as the dogs closed in. No escape. Of course a deer was far too nice an animal for Graham to be compared with. He was more of a magpie--jabbering, yobbish birds who stole from other birds' nests.

"Needles and camels," Gloria said to Graham. He had nothing to say on either topic, the only noise came from the machines that were keeping him alive. "What profiteth it a man if he gaineth the whole world but loseth his soul? Answer that one, Graham."

A Church of Scotland minister entered the ICU at that moment, dutifully visiting the lost lamb of his flock. Gloria had put "Church of Scotland" on Graham's admission form just to annoy him if he lived. Now she rather regretted not putting "Jain Buddhist" or "Druid," as it might have led to an interesting and informative discussion with whatever hierophant represented their religion in the Royal Infirmary. As it was, the Church of Scotland minister, apart from being surprised at finding Gloria quoting scripture ("No one does anymore"), proved harmless company, chatting to her about global warming and the problem of slugs. "If only they could be persuaded to eat just the weeds," he said, wringing his hands.

"From your mouth to God's ear," Gloria said.

"Well, no rest for the wicked," the minister said eventually, standing up and holding one of her hands in both of his for an intense moment. "Always a difficult time when a loved one is in the hospital," he said, glancing vaguely at Graham. Even supine and comatose Graham failed to look like a loved one. "I hope it all goes well for you," the minister murmured.

"So do I," Gloria said.

Chapter 12

Louise was running. Louise hated running, but it was marginally preferable to going to the gym. The gym involved regular commitment, and outwith her job, she was crap at regular commitment. Go ask Archie. So, all in all, it was easier to grit her teeth and throw on her sweats, then jog sedately around the estate to warm up before heading off over the fields and, if she was feeling virtuous, or guilty (the other side of the coin), then up the hill and back again. The one good thing about running was that it gave you the space to think. That was the downside as well, of course. Dualism, the Edinburgh disease, Jekyll and Hyde, dark and light, hill and valley, New Town, Old Town. Catholics and Protestants. A game of two halves. An eternal Manichaean dichotomy. It was her day off and she could have had a swim, read a book, caught up with laundry, but no, she had chosen to run up a bloody big hill. Confessions of a justified sinner. "Antisyzygy and the Scottish Psyche." She had done Hogg for her undergraduate dissertation, but then, who hadn't?

She had drunk what she thought of as a moderate three glasses of wine last night, but it was taking its toll on her. Her mouth felt like an old boot, and the Peking duck that had accompanied the wine still lived on like a game old bird. A rare and belated girls' night out at the Jasmine, to celebrate Louise's promotion two weeks ago. Afterward they had gone to "see something at the Festival," a vague, unplanned mission that hadn't taken into account the fact that anything good was going to be sold out by the time they arrived. They had ended up in a dive near the police mortuary, appropriately, and had gone to see some dreadful has-been comic. Three glasses of wine and Louise found herself heckling. They had made their rowdy way back through the Old Town, belting out "(You Make Me Feel Like) a Natural Woman" like the worst of hen parties. Louise liked to think it was Carole King's own version rather than anything more unbridled, but she might have been kidding herself. They were lucky they weren't lifted by the police. Shameful.

But there you go, she was paying for it now, because no good member of the narrow church that was Scotland got away without punishment. Scot-free.

By the time she was halfway up the hill, her breathing had started to become labored. She was thirty-eight and worried that she wasn't as fit as she would like to be, as fit as she should be. She had a pain exactly where her appendix would be if she still had one, she imagined an empty space where it had nestled like a fat worm. It had come out last year ("whipped out" seemed to be the cliche that hospital staff adhered to). Both her mother and her grandmother had to have appendectomies, and she wondered if that meant Archie would lose his too.

Archie talked vaguely about traveling in his gap year, although, at fourteen, both concepts--traveling and gap year--were still too far away to seem more than part of a nebulous, improbable future to him. She wondered if she could persuade him into having elective surgery on unnecessary organs before he set off (if he set off-- she couldn't imagine him having the energy, he was so lazy) so that he wouldn't find himself halfway up a mountain in New Zealand with peritonitis. A hundred or so years ago and Louise would be dead now. Or teeth--teeth must have killed a lot of people, abscesses that led to blood poisoning. A scratch, a cold.

The littlest thing. Her own mother died of liver failure, her flesh the color of ancient vellum, her organs pickled. Served her right. When Louise went to look at her in the Co-op undertakers last week, she had to resist the urge to take a needle with her, the old sailor's trick for death at sea, and push it through the yellow flesh (like rancid cheese) of her nose. Just to make sure she was really dead.

Her funeral was four days ago, at Mortonhall Crematorium, a service as torpid as her life. Though her name was Aileen, the minister drafted in continually referred to her as "Eileen," but neither Louise nor the ramshackle bunch of people who regarded themselves as her mother's friends had bothered to correct him. Louise liked the way "Eileen" made her mother seem like someone else altogether, a stranger and not her mother.

When she was doing her cool-down stretches on the front path, she noticed the thing on the doorstep where the milk would have been if they delivered milk in this area. A nondescript brown canister. She felt a sudden irrational fear. A bomb? Some weird practical joke? Would she open it and find feces or worms or something poisonous? It took her a couple of seconds of panic before she realized it was an urn, and that inside the urn was what was left of her mother. For some reason she had expected something tasteful and classical--an amphora made from alabaster, with a lid and a finial, not something made from a kind of plastic material that looked for all the world like a tea caddy. She remembered her mother's cousin saying he would collect the ashes from the crematorium for her. If it had been left up to her, she wouldn't have bothered.

Now she was left with the problem of what to do with the remains. Could she just put them in the bin? She had the feeling that that might be illegal.

She turned her key in the lock but had to give the front door a hefty shove to get it open. It had been a wet summer and all the wood in the house had swelled, although the door had fitted badly to begin with. The house was only three years old but had all kinds of small annoying things wrong with it--snagging that had never got done no matter how many times she had complained-- cracked plaster, sockets that were attached to the wall rather than the baseboard, a kitchen sink that wasn't earthed. Thank you, Graham Hatter. The house was the "Kinloch" and was the smallest detached you could buy, but it was a house, a proper house, the two-eyes-and-a-mouth kind that she used to draw when she was a child, houses that contained an ideal family. She had drawn that too--mother, father, two children, and a dog. All she'd had in reality was the mother, a pretty piss-poor one at that. Poor Louise. When she thought of her days as a child, she usually put herself in the third person. She was sure a psychiatrist would have a field day with this fact, but no psychiatrist was ever going to get anywhere near her head.

Modern houses were shit, but the estate ("Glencrest") was safe, inasmuch as anything ever was, most of the neighbors in her little enclave knew one another, if only by sight. There were no pubs anywhere near, there was a Neighborhood Watch, there were young women with pushchairs who went to Mother and Baby Groups, there were guys who washed their cars on the weekend. It was as near as you got to normal.

She took the urn inside with her and placed it on the kitchen draining board. She unscrewed the lid and poured some of the contents into a saucer and examined them, poking them around with a knife like a forensic technician. It was gritty, more like clinker than ash, and Louise half-expected to see a bit of tooth, a recognizable bone. Toxic waste. Perhaps if she added water to the saucer, her mother would be resurrected, the clay reformed from the dust. Her mothwing lungs might reinflate and she would rise like a genie from the urn and sit opposite Louise at the too-small kitchen table in the too-small kitchen and tell Louise how sorry she was for all the bad things she'd done. And Louise would say, "Too fucking late, get back in your urn."

The cat, old and arthritic, jumped awkwardly onto the draining board and sniffed hopefully at the contents of the saucer. Jellybean's health was failing, he had a tumor growing inside him, the vet said "the time was coming very soon" when Louise was going to have to make a "decision."

Jellybean was once a tiny, hurtling ball of fur as light as a shuttlecock, now he was a sack of bones. He was older than Archie, Louise had known the cat longer than she'd known anyone else, except for her mother, and she didn't count. She had found him when he was a kitten, abandoned in an empty house. She'd never had a pet, didn't like cats, still didn't like cats, but she loved Jellybean. It was the same with kids, she didn't like babies, didn't like children, but she loved Archie. She couldn't say it to anyone (especially not Archie) because they would think she was mad, but she thought she might love Jellybean as much as she loved Archie. Possibly more. They were her pair of Achilles' heels. They said love made you strong, but in Louise's opinion it made you weak. It corkscrewed into your heart and you couldn't get it out again, not without ripping your heart to pieces. She kissed the top of Jellybean's wobbly head and felt a sob catch in her chest. Jeez, Louise, pull yourself together, for fuck's sake.

The front door crashed open and was slammed shut again. Archie's passage through the house was marked by the noise of things thrown and dropped and walked into. He was like the ball in a pinball machine. He exploded into the kitchen, nearly falling over his own feet. After he was born, the midwife said, "Boys wreck your house, girls wreck your head." Archie seemed intent on doing both.

He looked hot and bothered. She remembered that feeling, suddenly having to don a school uniform in what still felt like the middle of summer. English schools went back in September, but Scottish schools had always thought it a good idea to make kids go back in the dog days of heat. It would be a Presbyterian thing. No doubt John Knox looked out his window one fine August morning and saw a kid bowling along the street with a hoop, or whatever kids did in the sixteenth century, and he thought, That child should be suffering in a hot, airless classroom in a uniform that makes him ridiculous.

Yeah, that would be Knox, Louise thought. Hey, Knox, leave that kid alone.

What had happened to her little boy? Had he been eaten by this monster? Not long ago Archie had been a handsome child--silky blond hair, round, kissable arms. Looking at him now, in his badly fitting body that seemed to have been put together from the salvage of other people's limbs, she found it hard to believe that women would ever find him attractive, that he would have sex with them, that he would fumble and wrestle and convulse, that he would do it with virgins and married women, with college students and girls who worked in shops. Her heart ached for him in his new ugliness, made even more poignant somehow by the fact that he seemed unaware of it.

"What's that?" Archie asked, glancing at the saucer of ash. No "Hello, Mum," no "How was your day?"

"My mother, what's left of her."

He grunted incomprehension.

"She was cremated last week," Louise reminded him. A public burning. She hadn't allowed Archie to go to the crematorium, she'd kept him away from his grandmother when she was alive, so she wasn't going to waste his time on her when she was dead. Louise took the morning off work, said she had a hospital appointment. It was amazing the lies you could tell that were believed without question. If anyone had looked back through her employment records, they would have seen that they showed her mother was already dead, everyone she knew believed that her mother died long ago. "She's dead to me," she would have said, if challenged over her veracity.

Archie lifted up the saucer and scrutinized the contents. "Cool," he said. "Can I have it?"

It wasn't his fault (she had to remind herself on a daily basis) that some unkind biological imperative had turned him into a hormone factory on overtime, producing torrents of the stuff on double shift. He should be out playing football, pool in a church youth club, on parade with the army cadets, anything that would channel the glut of chemicals in his body, but no, he spent his time lying around in the smelly lair of his bedroom, hooked up to his iPod, his PlayStation, his computer, the TV, like some kind of half-human, half-robot hybrid that needed electricity to maintain life. Bionic boy.

At least he wasn't on drugs (not yet, anyway). She was pretty sure she'd be able to tell. Some porn in the form of magazines-- she doubted there was anything he could hide from her, she was ruthless, she was an expert at that kind of thing, she was a mother. A few fairly tame porn mags--that was all par for the course for a fourteen-year-old, wasn't it? Better to be realistic than draconian. No online porn as far as she knew, unless he'd got himself a credit card, although it would hardly be difficult and he was good with computers, although not as good as his friend Hamish Sanders. Hamish was scarily good for a fourteen-year-old. Boys were definitely hardwired for that sort of stuff. Hamish set up Louise's broadband, and he was a hacker, she was pretty sure of it. She didn't like Hamish, he was a natural-born liar and full of shit. Louise was a natural-born liar too, but her lies had always tended to be utilitarian rather than malicious. That was her excuse, anyway.

The first time Archie brought him back to the house, Hamish said, "Hello, Ms. Monroe. Is it all right if I call you 'Louise'?" and she'd been so surprised she hadn't said, "No, it's not, you little wanker." Hamish was a new friend, he had been expelled from his posh school and wheedled into Gillespie's by his parents. Louise was still trying to find out what he had been expelled for. "Stuff," Archie said.

"Ooh, your mum's such a cop, Archie," she had overheard Hamish saying. "She's so powerful. I love it."

She wasn't sure how much Archie himself knew about hacking. She wouldn't mind so much if they were trying to get into the Pentagon or bring down a multinational, but they were probably just crashing some poor schmuck's e-mail in Singapore or Dorf.

The shoplifting was probably a one-off. All kids shoplifted. Louise had shoplifted, Woolworth's was begging you to slip their merchandise into your pocket--sweets, pencils, key rings, lip-stick--and Louise wouldn't have had any of that stuff if she hadn't taken it. When she was older she got a Saturday job at Woolworth's and always turned a blind eye to the thieving kids. But her own son, that was something different. Do as I say, not what I did.

Still, look on the bright side--he had friends (would-be Gothic slackers like himself, but friends were friends), and he wasn't dead. That was always the bottom line with kids. Dead was the un-thinkable. Never think it in case you make it come true, like some kind of bad voodoo.

"How was school?" The daily litany since he was five. "What did you do?" No satisfactory answer had ever been forthcoming. "We drew a tree, we had custard for lunch, a boy fell and hurt himself." No information about the curriculum. Louise used to wonder if they ever taught them anything. Now she didn't even get these little daily tidbits.

Archie mumbled something.

"What?"

"Stuff," he said, looking at the floor. She couldn't remember the last time he had made eye contact with her.

"You did 'stuff ' at school?"

"Yeah."

"Can you be more specific?"

"Mm." He gave the impression he was thinking but he looked vague, disassociated. Had he taken something? "What the Nazis did for us," he said finally.

"I think you might have got that slightly wrong."

She would have liked a good argument with him, a rumbustious set-to, but he couldn't do that, if she started in on him he just went quiet, waited it out patiently until she'd finished and then said, "Can I go now?"

The phone rang. She knew without answering it that it would be work. It was her day off, but they were short-staffed, everyone down with a bug, she'd been expecting all day to be called in. She watched Archie while she was talking on the phone. He was having a staring competition with the cat, not much of a competition probably, as Jellybean had cataracts and had started bumping into walls and furniture in much the same way that Archie did. Archie didn't seem to have any fond feelings for animals, but she'd never seen him be actively cruel to one. He wasn't a potential psychopath, she reminded herself, just a fourteen-year-old boy. Her baby. She put the phone down. "I have to go," she said. "There's been an incident out at Cramond."

"I know what 'incident' means," he said. "It means somebody's dead."

Louise wished he didn't look quite so excited by the idea. "Probably," she agreed.

Chapter 13

Martin was beginning to feel sick. He had eaten too many mints and nothing else, still living off the modest piece of toast he'd breakfasted on this morning, in another lifetime.

He went outside for some air and read the bus timetables. He sat on a low wall until it started to rain and then came back inside and found the hospital chapel. It was pleasantly nondescript, a relief from the continual to-ing and fro-ing that seemed to form the bedrock of hospital life. All this time he had Paul Bradley's holdall with him. It was black, made from a cheap imitation leather that seemed unaccountably masculine. The bag had a collapsed look about it, like a mouth with no teeth, and its strange gravity suggested it contained a brick or a Bible. He placed it on the seat next to him.

Martin had grown more and more curious about the stranger he was waiting so stoically for, and the longer he waited the more the intrigue scratched away at him. He had begun to think there was a short story in there somewhere, a novel even, a serious one, not a Nina Riley. A piece plotted around the mysterious stranger who comes into town. No, that sounded like A Fistful of Dollars. A man whose day is changed, who goes from being anonymous and unrecognized to being the center of an unlooked-for drama. It would be existential yet gripping (the two rarely went hand in hand, in Martin's experience). Where had Paul Bradley been going before his destiny was changed? The littlest thing. A man stepping off the pavement in front of your car. A girl saying, "You want coffee?" The littlest thing could change your life forever.

Martin wondered if it was really his meanderings that had brought him to the chapel. Wasn't it because he knew it would be the least busy place in the hospital? Hadn't temptation lured him like something vaguely obscene so that he could look in the holdall? Wasn't knowledge the reward of temptation? Eve, Adam's disobedient wife, knew that. So did Bluebeard's disobedient wife, nameless like Martin's own imaginary spouse.

He was dissembling. Didn't he know better? He had been tempted in St. Petersburg, and look what had happened. Knowledge was not necessarily a good thing. Go ask Eve. It was wrong to look in the bag, there was no way round that fact, it was a moral absolute, yet once the idea had lodged itself in his mind, it wouldn't go away. He had a bond with Paul Bradley, he had saved his life, for all he knew it might be the best thing he was fated to do in his own life. Didn't that bond give him permission to know more? You could find your way round temptation, you could say no, I'm not going to go behind the wooden door and buy a Lyudmila or a Svetlana, but then you end up picking up a girl at a matryoshka stall. "You're a weak-willed, lily-livered little pansy, Martin." Flowery language from his father, on the occasion of what? He couldn't remember, probably when he left the army cadets because he couldn't complete the assault course. A girl named Irina who had the palest skin, who called him Marty.

Of course, it could be a story about a man like Martin, a man to whom nothing ever happens. The Man to Whom Nothing Happened. How he got unexpectedly caught up in someone else's life, how he discovered something in a bag that changed his world forever. It was a lie, he lied to himself. All the time. Something had happened to him. Once. The incident. The girl from the matryoshka stall happened. Once. But once was enough.

The chapel was deserted. He checked this fact several times. This was how he would feel if he was about to masturbate in public--not that he would ever do that. The horror of being caught! Then, casually, as if it were his own bag that he needed something from, pulling on the zipper and peeling the bag open. A toiletry bag, a change of underwear, and a box, that was all. The box was unremarkable and black, like the holdall, but made of some rigid plastic material, pitted like an orange peel and with steel clasps. That was that, then. He had seen inside the bag and there was nothing that revealed anything about Paul Bradley, just a black plastic box, a mystery within a mystery. Perhaps the box would contain another box, and inside that box another box, and so on, like the Russian dolls. Like his own Russian dolls, the prelude to his brief courtship and consummation with the girl from the matryoshka stall. Wasn't that a lesson? A lesson not to go somewhere that you shouldn't?

Someone entered the chapel, and Martin clamped his hand on the bag as if it were about to shout out his guilty name. He thought it was a patient or a patient's relative, but it was some sort of church minister who was smiling encouragingly at him, saying, "Everything all right?" Martin said yes, everything was fine, and the minister nodded and smiled and said, "Good, good, always a difficult time when a loved one's in the hospital," and wandered out again.

Paul Bradley might be a rep of some kind, a traveling salesman, the black box containing samples. Samples of what? Or maybe it held jewelery? A gift. Something he was delivering. Would it really hurt to look? Could he not look now? It was only after he'd unhinged the metal clasps and started to lift the lid that he wondered if it might be a bomb.

"There you are, Martin!" He snapped the black box shut. His heart had gone up several floors and then shot down again to the bottom of the shaft. "We've been looking everywhere for you," Sarah, the nurse with the nice smile, said. She was standing in the doorway of the chapel, grinning at him. "Your friend's been discharged, he's ready to go."

"Right, I'm just coming," Martin said too loudly, grinning inanely back at her while surreptitiously tugging on the zipper. He stood up, and Sarah asked, "Are you all right, Martin?" touching his elbow. She looked concerned, yet tomorrow he knew she would have forgotten his name.

"Hello, Martin," Paul Bradley said. He was waiting in the corridor, a bandage on his head, but otherwise he looked fine. He took the bag off Martin and said, "Thanks for taking care of that." Martin was sure that just by looking at the bag, Paul Bradley would be able to tell that Martin had been searching inside it.

"Saying your prayers in there, Martin?" Paul Bradley asked, indicating the chapel with a nod of his head.

"Not really," Martin said.

"Not a religious man, then?"

"No. Not at all." It felt odd to hear Paul Bradley say "Martin," as if they were friends.

There was one forlorn taxi standing at the rank outside the hospital. Martin suddenly remembered the silver Peugeot and wondered what had happened to it. The police must have seen to it, presumably. Paul Bradley seemed unconcerned. "It was rented," he said offhandedly. Martin's own car was parked where Richard Mott had left it earlier in the day, in front of Macbet on Leith Walk. Too late to retrieve it now, he couldn't begin to imagine how much it was going to cost him to liberate it in the morning.

Martin hadn't really thought about where they were going until they climbed into the taxi and the driver said, "Where to?" and before he could speak, Paul Bradley said, "The Four Clans Hotel." Martin protested, offered his own home (as if he hadn't learned his lesson with Richard Mott), but Paul Bradley just laughed, said he had agreed to Martin "watching over" him in order to get out of the hospital and that Martin was now "discharged of his duty." He asked Martin's address and said to the taxi driver, "Did you get that?" peeling a twenty-pound note from the wad in his wallet and handing it through the window. "Take him on after you've dropped me, okay, mate?" You had to admire the man's sangfroid, Martin thought, he could have died today and yet here he was, quite the man, only the professional dressing on his head indicating the day might have deviated from its intended course. Martin had returned the wallet to Paul Bradley with a strange reluctance that he couldn't explain to himself.

The taxi eventually drew up outside a small tourist hotel in the West End that announced itself to be the "Four Clans." An illuminated red sign saying VACANCIES hung in one of the windows. Martin thought the sign made the hotel look like a brothel. He had no idea who or what the "four clans" were. Scottish by birth and inclination, Edinburgh born but not bred, Martin knew there were certain things about his native culture and history that he would never understand.

"It was all I could get," Paul Bradley said, peering at the unpromising frontage of the hotel through the taxi window. "The town's booked out."

"The Festival," Martin said gloomily.

Paul Bradley climbed out of the taxi, and Martin sighed but followed resolutely. It was no good, much as he wanted to go home and fall into his own comfortable bed, he just couldn't let Paul Bradley go like that. He had made a contract with a nice nurse named Sarah.

"Really," Paul Bradley said, "get on home, mate." Martin shook his head stubbornly, rooted himself onto the pavement as if Paul Bradley might try to place him physically back inside the taxi.

"I can't," he said. "I couldn't forgive myself if you died in the night, in a strange hotel room, away from home, family, friends." Martin heard himself talking like an agony aunt and didn't imagine it was going to have much of a persuasive effect on a man like

Paul Bradley.

"I'm not going to die, Martin," he said.

"I hope not," Martin said, "but I'd like to make sure. You can go," he said, turning suddenly to the taxi driver, slamming the passenger door of the taxi shut and slapping it twice with his palm as if it were a horse's flank, an uncharacteristically emphatic gesture that took him by surprise. He picked up Paul Bradley's bag, strode up the stone steps, and windmilled his way through the revolving door of the Four Clans before Paul Bradley could raise any further objections.

Paul Bradley followed him into the empty reception area and, making a gesture of helplessness, laughed and said, "Okay, Martin, mate, have it your way."

The hotel smelled of fried bacon, despite the time of day, and made Martin salivate although he hadn't eaten pig in twenty years and had no desire to start now. The hotel was surprisingly cheap and unsurprisingly awful. Anything that could be decorated with tartan was, even the ceiling had been papered in a funereal Black Watch. On the walls were hung framed prints of Old Edinburgh and heraldic clan insignia mounted on wooden shields.

Martin had a book about tartans, bought when he was looking for one for himself for a kilt, in the expectation that as a writer he would have a glamorous life attending black-tie dinners and celebrity launches, perhaps a reception at Holyrood Palace. "Alex Blake" had received a great many invitations in the past, but Martin always felt he was an inadequate substitute for his more exciting counterpart, people always seemed to be looking over his shoulder for the appearance of the real Alex Blake, and nowadays he rarely attended anything.

His mother was a MacPherson before her marriage, so he had eventually decided on a kilt made up in a MacPherson dress green but had never had the nerve to wear it in public, and it hung neglected in his wardrobe. Occasionally he tried it on and wore it around the house, but it was an odd, closeted act, as if he were a secretive transvestite rather than a swaggering Scot.

Paul Bradley banged authoritatively on the old-fashioned brass bell at the reception desk. It sounded very loud in the muffled atmosphere.

"You don't think it's a bit late for checking in?" Martin said, and Paul Bradley frowned at him and said, "It's me that's paying them, Martin, they're not doing me a favor."

An unfriendly night porter appeared and made a performance of searching for Paul Bradley's reservation. He looked them both up and down and said, "It says a single here." Martin wanted to say, "We're not gay," but then perhaps Paul Bradley was gay and would find his protestations insulting. (Perhaps the night porter was gay.) Martin thought that if he himself was gay, Paul Bradley would probably be out of his league as a partner, even for a night.

"I'm not staying," Martin said to the night porter, "not really. I'm not sleeping."The night porter barely glanced at the dressing on Paul Bradley's temple.

"I don't give a monkey's nut what you do," the night porter said in a long-suffering way, "but you have to pay for a double if there's two of you in the room."

"No problem," Paul Bradley said pleasantly, taking more twenties from his wallet and placing them on the counter.

Martin tried to take the holdall again, but Paul Bradley said, "Give us a break, Martin, you're not my manservant," and swung the heavy bag over his shoulder as if it weighed nothing and set off up the stairs, Martin in his wake, following the path of a Dress-Stewart stair-carpet. He avoided meeting the wretched gaze of the large, moth-eaten stag whose decapitated head had been hung above the stairs. He wouldn't have been surprised if it had suddenly opened its mouth and spoken to him. He wondered why it was all right to mount stags' heads but not, say, horses' heads or dogs'heads.

The room had a double bed, despite it being nominally a single, and Paul Bradley threw his bag down on the brown-and-orange bedspread and said, "I'll take the left side, you take the right," in an easy manner that made Martin think he was used to sleeping anywhere, used to sleeping with other men in a nonsexual way. He had known a lot of Paul Bradleys when he was younger. Army.

"Were you in the army?" he asked. He realized it was the first personal question he had asked him. Paul Bradley gave him a quizzical look but held it a little longer than most people would have, so Martin said, "Sorry, didn't mean to pry."

Paul Bradley shrugged it off, saying, "That's okay, I'm not hiding anything. I was in the navy, actually. SBS. We don't seek out attention like the SAS do. Now I'm just a desk jockey, pushing pieces of paper around. Very boring. Have you served in the forces, then?"

"Not exactly," Martin said. "My father was a CSM, he brought us up in a domestic boot camp."

"Us?"

"My brother and me. Christopher."

"Are you close?"

"No," Martin said. "Not really." He could see what Paul Bradley was doing, turning the tables, questioning Martin to avoid answering anything about himself. "I'll just sit in this chair here," he said. "I'm supposed to be watching you, not sleeping."

"Up to you," Paul Bradley said, taking the holdall into the tiny en suite and shutting the door. Martin tried to close his ears to the noise of another man washing, brushing, peeing. He switched on the television in an effort to mask the sounds, but it was showing snow on all channels. He leafed idly through the only reading matter in the room, a brochure advertising Scottish tourist attractions-- a mishmash of whiskey distilleries, woolen mills, and heritage trails.

"The bathroom's free," Paul Bradley said when he emerged, smelling of cheap soap and toothpaste. Martin felt like the shy bride on a virgin honeymoon, the groom oblivious to his blushing reticence.

Paul Bradley opened the minibar and said, "Have a drink."

"Maybe just a mineral water," Martin said, but when he inspected the minibar he saw that water was too sophisticated a request. Its contents were basic, no water or mixers, no Toblerone, no unpalatable Japanese crackers or quarter bottles of champagne, not even any salted peanuts--just cans of lager, spirit miniatures, and Irn-Bru. The sight of the miniatures triggered a sudden desire for alcohol, something to wash away the turmoil of the day.

"Let me fix you something," Paul Bradley said, retrieving a tiny bottle of whiskey and a can of Irn-Bru. "Hang on, I'll get a glass from the bathroom."

Martin looked in horror at the glass of orange liquid that Paul Bradley came back with but felt obliged to say, "Thanks," and take a drink. He was sure there were cells in his liver that were committing suicide rather than dealing with Scotland's two national drinks together in one vile cocktail. The copper tones of the room's decor, the fluorescent orange of the Irn-Bru, and the marmalade tint of the sodium streetlamp outside the window all contributed to Martin's sense of alienation, as if he had stepped into a sickly science-fiction world, tainted by some ecological catastrophe.

"All right?" Paul Bradley said.

"Yes, fine," Martin said. He took another drink of the orange liquid. It was deeply unpalatable yet strangely compelling. Swiftly, without sign of any self-consciousness, Paul Bradley stripped down to a gray T-shirt and gray boxers. Expensive, nice cotton jersey fabric, Martin noticed, although he averted his eyes almost immediately and stared instead at a surprisingly graphic print of Culloden that was hanging above the bed--bodies being pierced by bayonets and swords, open mouths, heads tumbling. When he next looked, Paul Bradley was on the bed, on top of the orange-and-brown coverlet. Martin wondered when it had last been washed. Within seconds, Paul Bradley's features softened into sleep.

Martin went to the bathroom and locked the door. He tried to urinate quietly. He washed his hands and dried them on the thin towel that was damp from Paul Bradley's ablutions. Paul Bradley's toothbrush stood at ease in a glass next to the taps. It was old, the bristles worn and splayed, proof of a life that preceded their strange encounter. Martin always found something poignant in the sight of a singular toothbrush. He had never walked into his own bathroom and seen two toothbrushes standing companionably together.

The holdall was on the floor, its mouth gaping wide. Martin could see the black box inside. Surely, Paul Bradley wouldn't have left it lying there if it contained something private or illegal? Adam's wife whispered in one ear, Bluebeard's wife in the other, urging him, Just one look. And Pandora, of course, not to forget Pandora, standing behind him, saying, Open the box, Martin.What harm can there be? He had a vague memory of watching Take Your Pick on television when he was a child, the audience shouting at the contestant, Open the box! The sensible ones took the money, the gamblers opened the box. Martin opened the box.

Inside was a charcoal-colored sponge material that had molded itself to the contents--a golfing trophy, a figure that was eight inches or so high, in a chrome finish that caught the light in the bathroom like a mirror. Dressed in plus fours and diamond-patterned sweater with a tammy on the head, he was caught at the height of his swing, the little pitted ball waiting forever at his feet. The plinth he stood on was engraved with the name R. J. HUDSON--1938, but there was no indication of what tournament it had been awarded for. It looked cheap, a generic kind of thing that ended its life in a charity shop following a house clearance after an old man died. The kind of old man who had lived alone with one toothbrush.

The trophy didn't look valuable enough to merit a padded box, and the box itself was all wrong, the size of it indicating a void. Nina Riley would have discovered the false bottom immediately. It took Martin a few moments longer. He placed the golfing trophy on the sink, next to the glass containing Paul Bradley's lone toothbrush, and wrestled with the charcoal sponge. It felt clammy to the touch, like the ancient green oasis that his mother used to stab with flower stems in her less-than-halfhearted attempts at artistic arrangements. Pandora, Eve, Bluebeard's anonymous wife, and the entire ghostly audience of Take Your Pick were at his back, urging him on. Finally, he managed to remove the sponge.

A gun.

He hadn't been expecting that somehow, yet when he saw it, there seemed a perfect logic about it.

The fact of the gun was overwhelming, eliminating any thought about the reason for it. It took his breath away, literally, and he had to hold on to the sink for a few seconds before he recovered.

Not any old gun. A Welrod. Of course, that figured, an ex-SBS man would have a Welrod. His father had owned an old one, illegally. He kept it in a shoe box on top of the wardrobe, the same place that Martin's mother kept her "party shoes"--uncharacteristically frivolous footwear in gold or silver leather. Although Martin was born more than a decade after the war ended, he and Christopher were, nonetheless, brought up on tales of their father's best years-- parachuting behind enemy lines, hand-to-hand combat, daring escapes--like one of their boys' comics come to life. Were those tales of Harry's all true? From this distance in time it seemed less likely. After the war, life was, necessarily, a disappointment for Harry. Martin himself knew, from a young age, that any chances he might have had in life to be a hero had already been used up by his father.

Martin wasn't a stranger to handling guns, his father's casualness around them had extended to teaching his sons to shoot. Christopher was a rotten shot, but Martin, to his father's perpetual astonishment, wasn't too bad. He might not be able to bowl a cricket ball, but he could line up a sight and hit a bull's-eye. He had never shot at a living thing (to his father's disgust), limiting himself to inanimate targets in junior competition.

Harry liked to take them out into the woods with shotguns, he was particularly fond of rabbit hunting. Martin had an unfortunate flashback to an image of his father stripping the pelt off a rabbit as easily as peeling a banana. The memory of the glistening candy-pink carcass hidden beneath the fur was still enough to make Martin nauseous, even now.

Once, when Martin and Christopher were children, they came home from school and found their father holding a gun--the Welrod, in fact--to their mother's head. "What do you say, boys," his father said, pressing the barrel harder against his wife's temple, "shall I shoot her?" He was drunk, of course. Martin couldn't remember what he had said or done, he was only eight at the time and he seemed to have blocked out the rest of the "incident." He hoped he had stood up for his mother, although God knows there were enough times when she didn't stand up for him. He always expected that, in the end, his father would blow his own brains out and was surprised by the tameness of his exit.

There was no way he could look at a gun these days and think it was a good thing. He touched it, noticed the slight tremor in his hand. He stroked the metallic smoothness, he'd expected it to be cold but it was almost the temperature of his hand. The Welrod, beloved of special forces everywhere, developed in Britain during the war.The only truly silenced gun. Nine-millimeter, single shot. Not a great range, best close-up. There was only one thing really that you would use a Welrod for, and that was shooting a single target at close range as covertly as possible. In other words, it was an assassin's gun.

He took a deep breath. He was going to walk out of the bathroom, out of the hotel room, quietly, it was obviously very important not to wake Paul Bradley. He was going to tiptoe down the stairs, past reception, and out of the building, then he would jump in the first taxi he found and ask to be taken to the nearest police station.

He opened the bathroom door. Paul Bradley was sleeping soundly, snoring gently, his arms flung out innocently, like a child's. Martin began to cross the room toward the door, but his legs started to melt. When he looked down, the carpet was swimming in front of his eyes. A spasm of dizziness seemed to pass through his brain. He was suddenly extraordinarily tired, he had never been this tired in his life, he hadn't known it was possible to be this tired. He had to lie down and sleep for a little while, right here on this unpleasant tartan carpet.

Chapter 14

Gloria made sure all the doors and windows were locked, set the burglar alarm, and then went down to the basement to check the security cameras.

All quiet on the garden front, except for a vixen trotting briskly across the lawn. Gloria put out food for the foxes most nights, she'd started by just giving them leftovers, but now she often bought them food specially, packets of pork sausages, a little piece of stewing steak. For the hedgehog (there may have been more than one, but how could you tell?) she put out cat food and bread and milk. The fox ate that as well, of course. Sometimes rabbits romped on the lawn (the fox ate them too), and Gloria had seen countless neighborhood cats, as well as the small, shy rodents that only came out at night. The fox particularly liked the small, shy rodents. Sometimes, down in the basement, it was like watching a nature program on television.

The night-vision cameras showed everything in strange greens and grays so that it seemed like a different garden altogether, a shadowy place seen through ghostly eyes. Something moved in the chaos of leaves that formed the big rhododendron bushes along the drive. Something glinting, diamonds set in jet. Eyes. Gloria tried to think what animal could be that tall. A bear? A horse? Both unlikely. She blinked and it was gone. A creature of the night.

For all their technology, the cameras couldn't go out there and snuffle among the leaves, couldn't howl and bark at an intruder. If Graham died, the first thing Gloria would do would be to go to the dogs' home at Seafield and bring home a soft-eyed lurcher or a springy little terrier. Graham didn't like animals, there had never been a pet in the house because he claimed to have a serious allergy to fur and feathers. Gloria had never witnessed any manifestation of this or any other allergy in Graham. Once, she had taken some fur from a neighbor's cat--the poor thing had some kind of alopecia, so all you had to do was stroke it and you came away with a handful of its coat--and she had placed the fur beneath Graham's pillow and stayed awake half the night watching him to see what happened, but he woke in the morning just the same as usual, fancying "a couple of poached eggs." Gloria suspected her children would have turned out to be nicer people if they had been brought up with a dog.

She thought of Graham occupying the limbo of the ICU, a dim no-man's-land between life and death, waiting for the Great Architect in the Sky to reveal his plans. Gloria was hugging to herself the secret of this occurrence, preparing herself for the consequences of it. She hadn't phoned either Ewan or Emily to tell them that their father was hanging around at death's door, waiting to see if it was going to open for him. She hadn't, in fact, told anyone. She knew she was supposed to tell people, she just couldn't be bothered somehow. They would make such a drama of it, and it seemed to Gloria that it was a thing that went off better if you were quiet about it. And anyway, there were things to do before he died, before people knew. So she would just leave him there in his hospital bed, hidden in plain sight, while she got on with preparing for widowhood. His sudden pitch toward mortality had taken her by surprise. Graham didn't often catch her on the hop like that.

Gloria climbed into bed with a mug of Horlicks, a plate of oat-cakes with Wensleydale cheese, and a fat Maeve Binchy. She always ate Wensleydale, never Lancashire, her sense of county loyalty was bred in the bone. It was in the same spirit of observance that she watched Emmerdale rather than Coronation Street, simply because Emmerdale was set in Yorkshire, although not, it was true, any part of Yorkshire that she recognized.

How vast and wonderful the marital bed seemed, now that it was completely absent of Graham--she had already washed all the sheets, turned and aired the mattress, hoovered out his dead skin from the pillows. As soon as she was settled nicely, Sod's Law, she heard the patient ringing of the phone. Gloria, who thought Alexander Graham Bell had a lot to answer for, had refused to install a phone by the bed. She failed to see the need. When she was in bed she wanted to sleep, not talk. Graham's mobile was surgically attached to his ear, so he didn't need a phone in the bedroom, and there was a panic button by the bed "for emergencies," although Gloria hesitated to imagine what kind of emergency might take place in the bedroom that would require her to hit a panic button. Graham wanting sex, maybe. She hauled herself reluctantly out of bed and went downstairs. It would be best, she supposed, to head off any queries at the pass.

The caller ID proclaimed Pam. Gloria sighed and picked up the receiver, but it wasn't Pam, it was her husband, Murdo. "Gloria! Sorry to bother you so late, I've been trying to raise Graham on his mobile." She could hear him trying to sound amiable, but Murdo was not an amiable man and the strain of pretending to be one made him sound mildly delirious. "We were supposed to be having a meeting this afternoon, but he didn't turn up. Is he there? Is he in his bed?"

"No, he's in Thurso."

The word seemed to send Murdo into a hysterical spin. "Thurso? You're joking. What do you mean, Thurso? What's he doing in Thurso, for fuck's sake, Gloria?"

Why had she chosen Thurso? Perhaps because it rhymed with "Murdo." Or because it was the furthest place she could think of. "He's building an estate up there."

"Since when?"

"Since now."

"That doesn't explain why he's not answering his phone."

"He forgot it," Gloria said stoutly.

"Graham forgot his phone?"

"I know, it's hard to believe, but there you go. Astonishing things happen all the time." (It was true, they did.)

Murdo made an agitated kind of noise, frustration and panic in equal measures. Fortunately, Graham's mobile began to ring at that moment somewhere in the further depths of the house, identified by its irritating "Ride of the Valkyries"ringtone. Gloria followed the thread of Wagner through the house, like a rat following the pied piper, until eventually she ended up in the utility room, where she had placed the plastic bag of Graham's belongings that she had brought back from the hospital. He would have been very annoyed to know that his bespoke summer-weight wool suit and his handmade shoes were stuffed in a hospital rubbish bag.

Delving into the bag, she finally recovered the phone from the inside pocket of Graham's jacket and held it up so that Murdo could hear it ringing.

"Hear that?" she said. " 'Ride of the Valkyries.' I told you he forgot it." Murdo made some kind of snorting noise and rang off. "Good riddance to bad rubbish," Gloria said. Some people had no manners.

She answered Graham's mobile and heard an urgent voice saying, "Graham, it's me, Maggie. Where are you? I've been ringing you all afternoon."

"Maggie Louden," Gloria murmured to herself, trying to conjure up a mental picture of her. She was a new member of Graham's sales force, a thin-faced woman in her late forties, with a helmet of dyed black hair, lacquered to her head like a beetle's shell. The last time Gloria had seen her was at Christmas. Once a year, everyone--from judges and chief constables to brick suppliers and roofing contractors, as well as the more privileged members of the Hatter Homes' office staff--was invited to drink champagne and eat mince pies under the Hatter roof at the Grange. She remembered Maggie clattering like a cockroach across the tiles in the hall in her badly fitting Kurt Geiger heels. Gloria didn't remember any member of the sales force being invited to their Christmas party before.

Gloria was on the point of answering, of saying, "Hello, Maggie, it's Gloria here," when Maggie said, "Graham, darling, are you there?"

Darling? Gloria frowned. She remembered Graham standing in front of the Christmas tree with Maggie Louden, Murdo Miller, and Alistair Crichton, one hand round a glass of malt, the other placed blatantly on Maggie's back at the tidemark where the black crepe of her cocktail dress met the white crepe of her skin. One of the waitresses employed for the evening offered them a plate of mince pies, and Graham had taken two, managing to get them both in his mouth at the same time. Maggie Louden had waved them away as if they were radioactive. Gloria felt suspicious of people who had no time for sugar, it was a personality flaw, like preferring weak tea. Tea and sugar were a test of character. She should have known then.

Graham had leaned toward Maggie, his jowly jaw almost brushing the shellac of her hair as he murmured something in her ear. It had seemed unlikely to Gloria that he was commenting on the new tree lights that she'd recently bought from Dobbies, but she had thought he was just being Graham. She often thought that if he'd been a binman or a newsagent he might not have been so attractive to women. If he hadn't possessed money and power and charisma, he would--let's face it--have been just an old man.

The phone felt suddenly hot in her hand. "Is it done yet, is it over?" Maggie asked. "Have you got rid of Gloria? Have you got rid of the old bag?"

Gloria almost dropped the phone in surprise. Graham was planning to divorce her? Graham was having an affair with one of his sales team, and the pair of them were talking about getting rid of her? Gloria slipped the phone back in Graham's pocket and left Maggie Louden speaking to his summer-weight wool. She could still hear her muffled voice--"Graham? Are you there, Graham?"-- like a persistent clairvoyant at a seance. In the distance Gloria heard the soft explosion of the firework that signaled the end of the Tattoo. Had capitalism really saved mankind? It seemed unlikely, but it looked like it might be too late to argue with Graham about it now.

Chapter 15

He had let her go. He had heard Marlee's voice in his ear saying, "Daddy," quietly as if she were treading water next to him, and he had relinquished his dead mermaid and kicked for shore. Helping hands had hooked him out of the harbor and taken him into the Cramond Inn, where a malt whiskey and a bowl of hot soup had brought him back to life. By the time the police arrived, he was wrapped in blankets and his clothes were being washed and dried in industrial machines somewhere in the recesses of the building.

Then he had begun the seemingly never-ending process of telling and retelling his story to a succession of people. "Have you been drinking, sir?" the first uniformed constable on the scene asked him, looking pointedly at the glass in his hand that had just been refilled. Jackson would have considered hitting him if he could have summoned up the energy. Another reluctant part of him acknowledged that the guy was just doing his job.

The final person to arrive ("This is actually my day off," he heard her say to someone) was a detective, a woman, with more attitude than manners. She gave him her card, which had printed on it DETECTIVE SERGEANT LOUISE MONROE, the "Sergeant" crossed out in Biro and replaced with a handwritten "Inspector." He thought that was quite funny. A newly minted inspector. He hoped she didn't have anything to prove. She also asked if he had been drinking.

"Yes, I have been drinking," he said, showing her the now half-empty glass. "So would you under the circumstances."

"Don't make assumptions," she said sharply. She was pretty, sort of. Her mouth was a little too big for her face and her nose a little too small and she had a crooked front tooth, but she was still pretty. Sort of. Late thirties, dark hair, dark eyes, Jackson had never had much luck with blondes. Her hair was in a bob, neat and practical, and she tucked it behind her ears every so often in a gesture that Jackson always found appealing. In women, anyway. It was a remote and far-flung outpost of his brain that was making this appraisal. For the most part he was just trying to stop himself from falling asleep from exhaustion.

She liked asking questions. What was he doing on Cramond Is-land, had he realized the tide was coming in when he set out, how had he got here?

"Bus," he said reluctantly. He felt as if he were owning up to being a lower life-form. He was naked beneath the blankets, and he felt absurdly vulnerable. A naked man who took buses and had nothing better to do with his time than lurk around suspiciously on deserted islands. With the tide coming in. How stupid was he? Very, obviously.

What was he doing in Edinburgh? He shrugged and said he was here for the Festival. She gave him a skeptical look that made him feel as if he were lying, he obviously didn't look the Festival type. He thought about saying, "My girlfriend's in a play, she's an actress," but really that was nobody's business but his own, and "girl-friend" sounded stupid, girlfriends were what young guys had. Jackson tried to think what he would have been doing if he'd been in charge of the investigation, would he be as suspicious of his own credentials as Louise Monroe was or would he already have divers out on police launches, uniforms combing the coastline?

"Most people are upset when they find a dead body," Louise Monroe remarked. " 'Shock' and 'horror' are the usual reactions, yet you seem remarkably phlegmatic, Mr. Brodie. Have you seen a dead body before?" What did she think--that he'd mistaken a seal for a woman, a lump of driftwood for a body?

"Yes," he said, weariness finally making him snap, "I've seen hundreds of dead bodies. I know exactly what a dead body looks like, I know what a body looks like when it's been blown up, burned, hung, drowned, shot, stabbed, beaten to death, and hacked to pieces. I know what people look like when they've stood in front of a train going at a hundred miles an hour, when they've been decomposing inside a flat for the whole of a summer, and when they're three months old and they've died in their sleep for no apparent reason. I know what a dead body looks like, okay?"

The butch DC accompanying Louise Monroe looked as if she were getting ready to handcuff him, but Louise Monroe nodded and said, "Okay," and he liked her for that. "Police?" she said, and he said, "Ex. Military and civil--Cambridge." Name, rank, and number, tell the enemy nothing else.

Somewhere back at Force Command, she told him, someone must have decided there was a chance the woman was still alive, and the coastguard had sent out an RNLI launch as well as alerted an RAF helicopter. "So you can stop fretting, Mr Brodie." "Fretting" wasn't exactly the word he would have used himself.

"It's pointless," he said, "she was dead." Every time he said it, she seemed to slip farther away.

"Has anyone reported a girl missing?" he asked. There were always girls missing, always had been, always would be. There were no women or girls reported missing who fitted the description he had given, Louise Monroe said.

"Well, she probably hasn't been reported yet," Jackson said. "She hadn't been in the water long. And sometimes it takes a while for people to realize that someone isn't where they should be. And sometimes people are never missed. Not everyone has someone who'll notice they've gone." Who would miss him? Julia, Marlee, that was it. Without Julia there would be just Marlee.

"Have you got the egg with you? In your pocket, maybe?" she said.

Jackson frowned. "What do you mean?"

"I just wondered if you had it with you--the egg you're going to teach me to suck." She was a spiky little thing. Not that little, taller than Julia, but then everyone was taller than Julia.

Jackson wondered if she had someone at home who would notice if she was gone. No wedding ring, he saw, but that didn't mean anything. His own wife (ex-wife) had never worn a ring, never even changed her name to his, yet, interestingly, on the back of her Christmas card last year there had been one of those little address labels that unequivocally declared MR. AND MRS. D. LASTINGHAM. Jackson had faithfully worn his wedding ring, he had taken it off only at the end of last year, throwing it into the Seine from the Pont Neuf on a weekend visit to Paris. He had meant it to be a dramatic gesture of some kind, but in the end he had let it fall quietly, a brief glint of gold in the winter sun, embarrassed at what people might think (sad middle-aged loser whose divorce has finally come through).

"Could be suicide," he speculated. (Yes, apparently he did have the egg with him, although she was no grandmother.) "Not many girls drown themselves, though, women aren't noted for drowning. Maybe she simply fell into the water, perhaps while she was drunk. A lot of drunk girls around these days."

One day, undoubtedly, his daughter, Marlee, would be drunk. Statistically she would smoke cigarettes in her adolescence. Take drugs at least once, have a near miss in a car. Suffer a broken heart (or several), give birth twice, get divorced once, have an illness, need an operation, grow old. If she grew old she would have osteoporosis and arthritis, shuffle along with a walking stick or a shopping cart, need a hip replaced, watch her friends die one by one, move to a nursing home. Die herself.

"Mr. Brodie?"

"Yes."

By the end of the afternoon a lot of hardware had buzzed around the area, the RAF, the RNLI, a police launch, a Port Authority pilot vessel, plus a lot of manpower--all to no avail. They found zilch, not even the camera he'd left behind when he went into the water, although they had recovered his jacket (thank you), which at least proved he had been on the island because even that seemed to be in question.

"Well, at least you didn't imagine that," Louise Monroe said. She smiled, she had a crooked smile that took the edge off any congeniality.

"I didn't imagine any of it," Jackson said.

Consider the first person on the scene as a suspect. That was what she was doing. It was what he would do. "What was the purpose of your visit to Cramond, sir?" What could he say--loafing? That he was at a permanently loose end? He thought about saying, "I understand I'm one of you," but he wasn't, not anymore, he wasn't part of the coterie anymore. The club. And part of him--a perverse part, undoubtedly--was curious to know what it was like on the other side. It had been a long time since he'd visited that other side, Jackson's criminal career started and ended when he was fifteen and was caught breaking into the local shop with a friend to nick cigarettes. The police caught them and hauled them off to the station and frightened the life out of them.

"There was a card," he said suddenly to Louise Monroe. "I'd forgotten. It was a business card. Pink, black lettering, it said--" What did it say? He could see the card, he could see the word, but he couldn't read it, as if he were trying to decipher something in a foreign language or a dream. Feathers? Fantasia? And a phone number. His good memory for numbers, just about all he had a good memory for nowadays, seemed to have deserted him. "The name began with an 'F,' " he said. He couldn't remember what he'd done with the card, you would have thought he would have put it in his jacket pocket, but there was no sign of it.

"We didn't find a pink card when we were on the island," Louise Monroe said.

"Well, you weren't looking for one, were you?" Jackson said. "It wasn't exactly big."

"You photographed a dead body?" the butch DC said suddenly, giving him a "you crazy psycho" look.

He thought of the pictures inside the camera, the little jewellike compositions of Venice with Julia in all her loveliness, nestling next to pictures of an unknown corpse. "Of course I did," he said.

The butch DC was named Jessica-something, he missed her surname when she introduced herself. "Jessica" was a girly name for a girl who wasn't girly. "Sure this wasn't a bit of a prank, Mr. Brodie?" Jessica-something said. He ignored her, the name was on the tip of his tongue, feathers, fantasia, fandango--"Favors!" he said suddenly, that was it, that was what had been written on the missing card.

As he was leaving, he heard Louise Monroe requesting the assistance of police divers. He wondered how pissed she was going to be at him if she found nothing. A lot, probably. A uniformed constable gave him a lift back into town, to Julia's venue, where he discovered the actors taking a break from the dress rehearsal.

Julia, now wan rather than flushed, came outside with him, where she smoked a cigarette with a frightening kind of purpose, her inhalations punctuated by rasping breaths. "Tobias is a pillock," she said angrily. She was nervy and talkative, where earlier she had been quiet and subdued. "And you know Molly?"

"Mm," Jackson said. Of course he didn't.

"The neurotic one," Julia said (not very helpfully, they were all neurotic as far as Jackson could make out). "Doesn't know her lines. She's still on the book."

"Really?" Jackson said, trying to strike a note of mild outrage at the idea of someone being "on the book." He wasn't entirely sure what that meant, but he could take an educated guess.

"It was all over the place today, thank God we've got previews tomorrow. Did you get my text about the ticket for Richard Mott?"

So that was what her text had said. The name "Richard Mott" was vaguely familiar, but he couldn't put a face to it. "How come you had a free ticket?" he asked.

"I had a drink with him at lunchtime. He gave me one."

"Just you?"

"Yes. Just me." He clearly remembered her having no time for lunch. "We're going to have to work through lunch." Jackson frowned.

"Don't worry," Julia said, "Richard Mott's not my type."

"I'm not worried."

"You're always worried, Jackson. It's your default setting. You could meet up with me afterward. We're going to be hours yet." Julia sighed and stubbed her cigarette out and as an afterthought said, "How was your afternoon?"

Jackson considered all the things he could say (I nearly drowned today, I found a corpse, I sparked a huge, futile air-sea search, oh, and the police think I'm a paranoid delusional nutter) and chose, "I went to Cramond."

"That's nice, did you take photos?"

"I lost the camera."

"No! Our camera? Oh, Jackson, that's awful." He felt an unexpected swell of emotion when she said "our camera" rather than "my camera."

He supposed from Julia's point of view that it was awful, but compared with everything else that had happened to him this afternoon, he found it hard to get worked up about it. "Yeah," he said. "Sorry."

He accompanied her back down to her inner circle of hell and watched her walk onstage and take her place in an angst-strewn scene where she had to spend ten minutes staring at a black square that, at that moment (it was a multifunctional piece of scenery), was representing a window opening onto a raging Arctic storm-- a fact that Jackson knew only because he had spent some time in London doing lines with Julia. He reckoned he could have understudied for her if necessary (now that would be a nightmare). There was something noble and tragic in the mute pose she adopted. With her sackcloth and disordered hair, she looked like the survivor of something terrible and unspeakable. He wondered if, when she was doing scenes like that, she was thinking about her own past.

He turned abruptly on his heel and potholed his way out of the building. The sound of a police siren somewhere in the distance made his heart leap with the old familiar thrill. When the helicopter and launches had arrived at Cramond, he had badly wanted to take control, it had been hard watching Louise Monroe being the one with all the power. Twice in one day he had observed women younger than himself wielding more authority. Nothing to do with them being women (his only precious child was a girl, after all), more to do with Jackson not being a man. A real man. Real men didn't accept money off dead old ladies and live in France. He missed his warrant card, he missed his child, he missed his iPod, which he had accidentally left behind. He missed the sad-voiced women who let him share their pain. Lucinda, Trisha, Eliza, Kathryn, Gillian, Emmylou. Most of all he missed Julia, yet she was the one thing he had with him.

Without anything better to do than lie in an empty bed and think about what he didn't have, he went and picked up his ticket for Richard Mott.

Jackson remembered Richard Mott from the eighties, he hadn't found him funny then and he didn't find him funny now. Neither did most of the audience, apparently--Jackson was shocked by how vicious some of the jeering and catcalling was. He dropped off a couple of times, but the circumstances were hardly conducive to sleep. When Richard Mott finished to grudging applause, Jackson thought, There goes another hour of my life. He was too old now, too aware of the finite nature of what was left to squander precious time on crap comedy.

He slipped away as quickly as possible and made his way down to the subterranean depths of Julia's venue, only to find it dark and empty. One day he would find a Minotaur in there. Julia had said they would be hours, but there was no sign of anyone. He turned his phone back on and found a text from Julia, saying, "All done, see you back at the flat."

He discovered a fire exit and made the mistake of leaving the building through it so that when he hit the street, he had no idea where he was. He had read in National Geographic (he had recently taken out a subscription, thereby incontrovertibly confirming his middle-aged status) that it had been proved by geneticists that women navigated by landmarks, men by spatial indicators. It was dark, and lacking any spatial indicators, he tried looking for landmarks, searching for the shape of the Royal Mile, for the skyline of spires and crowstepped gables culminating in the pomp and circumstance of the Castle. He looked for the massy bulk of the museum on Chambers Street. He looked for the spans of the landlocked bridges, but all he found was the mouth of a dark alley, a narrow close that led to an endless flight of stone steps. He could see lights at the top, and a street still humming with Festival-goers, and he set off without thinking much beyond This looks like a shortcut. A "snicket," that's what he would have called it when he was a boy. Different language, different times.

Jackson was forever warning Marlee (and Julia, come to that, but she never listened) about the foolishness of going down dark alleys. "Daddy, I'm not even allowed out in the dark," Marlee said reasonably. Of course, if you were a girl, if you were a woman, you didn't need to go down a dark alley in order to be attacked. You could be sitting on a train, stepping off a bus, feeding a photo-copier, and still be plucked from your life too soon by some crazy guy. Not even crazy, that was the thing, most of them weren't crazy, they were just guys, period. Jackson would have been happier if the women in his life never left the house. But he knew even that wasn't enough to keep them safe. "You're like a sheepdog," Julia told him, "every last lamb has to be accounted for."

Jackson himself wasn't afraid of dark alleys, he thought he prob-ably posed more of a threat himself in a dark alley than anyone he was likely to encounter, but obviously he hadn't reckoned on Honda Man. The Incredible Hulk on steroids in all his pumped-up glory, barreling out of nowhere and staggering into Jackson with all the grace of a rugby prop. Jesus Christ, Jackson thought as he hit the ground, this was some kind of town. The Minotaur was out of the labyrinth.

He got to his feet instinctively, never stay down, down means kicked, down means dead, but before Jackson could even get a ra-tional thought up and running--Why? would have been a good one to start with--Honda Man had slammed him with a punch like a battering ram. Jackson heard the air leaving his own body with a kind of ouf! sound before he slumped to the ground. His diaphragm turned to stone, he immediately lost interest in rational thought, his only concern had become the mechanics of his breathing--why it had stopped, how to start it again. He managed to get on all fours, like a dog, and was rewarded by Honda Man stamping on one of his hands, a bitchy kind of move, in Jackson's opinion, but it hurt so much he wanted to cry.

"You're going to forget about what you saw," Honda Man said.

"Forget what? What did I see?" Jackson gasped. Full marks for trying to have a conversation, Jackson, he thought. On all fours and still talking--give this man a medal. He blew out air and sucked it in again.

"Don't try to be fucking clever, you know what you saw."

"Do I?" In reply, Honda Man gave him a casual kick in the ribs that made him recoil in agony. The guy was right, he should stop trying to be clever.

"I'm told that you've been causing a fuss, Mr. Brodie." (The guy knew his name?) Jackson thought about saying that he hadn't been doing any such thing, that, indeed, he had actively refrained from saying anything about the road rage to the police and had no interest at all in being a witness, but all that he managed to say was "Uh," because one of Honda Man's heavy-duty boots gave him another hefty nudge in the ribs. He had to get up off the ground. You had to keep getting to your feet. All the Rocky films seemed to pass before his eyes in one go. Stallone shouting his wife's name at the end like he was dying. "Adrian!" The Rockies I-V contained important moral lessons that men could learn to live by, but what did they teach you about fighting impossible enemies? Keep going, against the odds. When there was nothing else to do, all that was left was seeing it through to the end.

Honda Man was squatting like a sumo and taunting Jackson by making gestures with his hands as if he were helping him reverse into a parking space, the universal machismo mime for Bring it on.

The guy was twice his size, more like an unstoppable force of nature than a human being. Jackson knew there was no way he could fight him and win, no way he could fight him and live. He suddenly remembered the baseball bat. Where was it? Up his sleeve? No, that would be ridiculous, a magician's trick. They circled round like street-fighting gladiators, keeping their weight low. Honda Man obviously had no sense of humor, because if he had, he would have been laughing at Jackson for behaving as if he had a chance against him. Where was the baseball bat?

The other thing Jackson always tried to impress on Marlee-- and Julia--was what you had to do if you were attacked because you'd been foolish enough to ignore his advice in the first place and go down the dark alley.

"You're at a disadvantage," he tutored them. "Height, weight, strength, they're all against you, so you have to fight dirty. Thumbs in the eyes, fingers up the nostrils, knee to the groin. And shout, don't forget to shout. Lots of noise. If worst comes to worst, bite wherever you can--nose, lips--and hold on. But then shout again. Keep shouting."

He was going to have to forget fighting like a man and fight like a girl. Navigating like the fairer sex hadn't worked for him, but nonetheless he went for Honda Man's eyes with his thumbs--and missed, it was like jumping for a basketball hoop. He made it to the nose somehow and bit down and held on. Not the most disgusting thing he'd ever done, but close. Honda Man screamed-- an unearthly storybook-giant kind of sound.

Jackson let go. Honda Man's face was covered in blood, the same blood that Jackson could taste in his own mouth, coppery and foul. He took his own advice and shouted. He wanted the po-lice to come, he wanted concerned citizens and innocent by-standers to come, he wanted anyone to come who could stop the madman mountain. Unfortunately, the shout attracted the dog, and Jackson remembered that it wasn't the baseball bat he needed to worry about--it was the dog. The dog that was making a bee-line for him, its teeth bared like a hound from hell.

He knew how to kill a dog, in theory anyway--you got hold of its front legs and just pulled it apart, basically--but a theoreti-cal dog was different from a real dog, an enraged real dog, packed with muscle and teeth, whose only ambition was to tear your throat out.

Honda Man stopped screaming long enough to give the dog its orders. He pointed at Jackson and yelled, "Get him! Kill him!"

Jackson watched in mute, paralyzed horror as the dog leaped in the air toward him.