WEDNESDAY

Chapter 16

Richard Mott woke with a start. He felt as if an alarm bell had gone off in his head. He had no idea what time it was. Martin hadn't had the decency to provide a clock for his guest room. It was light outside, but that didn't mean anything, it hardly seemed to get dark at all up here. "Jockland"--that's what he'd begun to call it. Edinburgh, the Athens of the North, that was a fucking joke. He felt as if a slug had crawled into his mouth while he slept and taken over for his tongue. He could feel a trail of snail drool on his chin.

He hadn't got to bed until four, and dawn was already struggling to make an appearance by then. Tweet, tweet, fucking tweet all the way home. Had he got a taxi or had he walked? He had been drinking in the Traverse Bar long after midnight, and he had a vivid, bizarre memory of being in a lap-dancing club on the Lothian Road--"Shania," if he wasn't mistaken, sticking her crotch in his face. A real skank. The showcase had gone okay, those kind of middle-of-the-day BBC things always attracted an older, well-behaved audience, the kind that still believed the BBC was synonymous with quality. But the ten o'clock show ...wankers, the lot of them. Bastard wankers.

The sun poked its dispassionate finger through the curtains, and he noticed Martin's Rolex on his wrist. Half-past five. Martin didn't need a watch like this, he wasn't a Rolex man. What chance was there that Martin might give it to him? Or maybe he could "accidentally" take it home with him.

The alarm in his head went off again, and he realized it was actually the doorbell. Why the fuck didn't Martin get it? Again, longer this time. Jesus. He staggered out of bed and down the stairs. The front door was on the latch rather than fastened with the usual endless series of bolts and locks and chains that Martin barricaded himself in with. The guy was such an old woman about some things. Most things. Richard Mott pulled open the door and was hit by the daylight, knew how vampires felt. There was a guy standing there, just a guy, not a postman or a milkman or anyone else who might have claimed the right to be waking him at this hour.

"What? It's half-past five in the morning. It's still yesterday, for fuck's sake."

"Not for you," the man on the doorstep said, pushing him roughly inside. "For you it's tomorrow."

"What the--?" Richard Mott said as the man shoved him into the living room.

The guy was huge, his nose swollen and ugly, as if he'd been in a fight. He was very nasal, English, a bit of something flat, Nottingham, Lancaster, perhaps. Richard Mott imagined himself giving a description afterward to the police, imagined himself saying, "I know accents, I'm in the business."He had tried his hand at acting in the early nineties, there'd been a bit part on The Bill where he'd played a guy (a comic so he wouldn't have to "stretch" him-self) with a crazy female stalker who wanted to kill him, and one of the Sun Hill detectives counseled his character that to be a survivor you had to think like a survivor, you had to picture yourself in the future, after the attack. This advice came back to him now, but then he remembered that his character had actually been killed by the crazy stalker.

The insane stranger was wearing driving gloves, and Richard thought this probably wasn't a good sign. The gloves had holes from which the guy's knuckles protruded, little atolls of white flesh, and Richard thought there was a joke in there somewhere, perhaps you could reference those classic yob knuckle-tattoos "love" and "hate," but try as he could he couldn't render this thought into anything remotely coherent, let alone funny. From nowhere the guy produced a baseball bat.

What followed ought to be in slow motion, no sound, a music track instead--Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer" or perhaps something poignant and classical--the cello--Martin would know. Richard Mott's legs buckled suddenly and he fell to his knees. He'd never experienced that before, you heard talk about it but you didn't think it happened.

"That's good," the man said, "get down on the floor where you belong."

"What do you want?" His mouth was so dry he could hardly speak. "Take anything, everything. Take everything in the house." Richard Mott flipped desperately through a mental inventory of everything in Martin's house. There was a good stereo, a fantastic wide-screen TV over in the corner behind him. He tried to gesture with a nerveless arm in the direction of the television, spotted Martin's Rolex on his wrist, tried to bring it to the man's attention.

"I don't want anything," the man said (quite calmly, his calmness was the worst thing).

Richard's phone rang, breaking the strange, intense intimacy between them. They both stared at it, sitting on the coffee table, a bizarre intrusion from outside. Richard Mott tried to calculate whether or not he could reach for it, flip it open, shout down the line to whoever was phoning him at this hour, "Help me, I'm with a crazy guy," prove he wasn't joking, give the address (like someone in a movie, a sudden remembered image of Jodie Foster in Panic Room), but he knew it was no good, before he could even touch the phone, the crazy guy would have brought his baseball bat down on his arm. He couldn't even bear thinking about the kind of pain the crazy guy could inflict. He started whimpering, he could hear himself, like a dog. Jodie Foster was made of sterner stuff, she wouldn't whimper.

The phone stopped ringing and the crazy guy pocketed it, laughing, taking up the Robin Hood theme song where the phone had left off. "Bunch of faggots if you ask me," he said to Richard. "Don't you think?" Richard felt a warm trickle of urine working its way down his thigh. "I didn't like what you did today."

"The show?" Richard said in disbelief. "You're here because you didn't like the show?"

"Is that what you call it?"

"I don't understand. I've never met you before. Have I?" He had gone through his life indifferent to whether or not he offended people, it struck him now that maybe he should have taken more care.

"Stay down on your knees and face me."

"Do you want me to suck your cock?" Richard offered desper-ately, trying to make himself sound eager despite his cotton-mouth, despite the warm stain on his boxers. He wondered what he would do to save himself from being hurt by this man. Proba-bly anything.

"You filthy bastard," the man said. (Okay, he'd read that one wrong.) "I don't want you to do anything, Martin. Just shut the fuck up, why don't you?"

Richard Mott opened his mouth to say that he wasn't Martin, that Martin was asleep upstairs in his room and he would very happily show him the way so he could hurt Martin instead of himself, but all he managed was to croak, "I'm a comedian," and the man threw back his head and laughed, his mouth open so wide that Richard Mott could see the fillings in his back teeth. He felt a sob break in his throat.

"Oh you fucking are, there's no doubt about that," the guy said, and then quickly, quicker than in Richard Mott's imagination, he

brought the bat down, and Richard Mott's world exploded into pieces of light--little filaments, like in old-fashioned lightbulbs-- and he realized he had told his last joke. He could have sworn he heard applause, and then all the little filaments burned out one by one until there was only darkness, and Richard Mott floated into it.

His last thoughts were about his obituary. Who would write it? Would it be good?

Chapter 17

Jackson woke in the tailspin of a nightmare. Someone, a shadowy figure he didn't recognize, had handed him a package. Jackson knew that the package was very precious, and if he dropped it something unspeakably awful would happen. The package was too heavy and awkward, though, it had no fixed center of gravity and seemed to move around in his arms so that no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't hold on to it. He woke up with a start of horror at the moment that he knew the package was about to slip out of his arms forever.

He hauled himself up and sat on the edge of what passed for a bed. He felt dog-rough, as if his body had been fed through a giant mangle during the course of the night, and his eyes seemed to have been poached--or possibly fried--while he slept. His ribs ached and his hand was throbbing, it had swollen up nicely, the imprint of a boot clearly visible on it.

The seawater that had sluiced through his body yesterday had diluted his blood, and it was going to require gallons of hot, strong coffee to restore its viscosity, to restore Jackson to some semblance of life. He wondered what kind of toxins and pollutants swam around in the water. And sewage, what about sewage? Best not to think about that.

He remembered the dead woman--not that he was about to forget her--and wondered if she had washed up somewhere overnight.

If he was in France he would be going for a swim in his piscine round about now. But he wasn't in France, he was in a holding cell at St. Leonard's Police Station in Edinburgh.

He had never been in a jail cell before. He had put people in them, and taken people out of them, but he had never actually been locked in one himself. Nor had he journeyed from a holding cell to the Sheriff Court in the back of a Black Maria, which was like traveling in something that was a cross between a public convenience and what he imagined a horse box would be like. Nor had he been up before a court on the wrong side of the rails, and he had certainly never before been pronounced "guilty" and fined a hundred pounds for assault and gone from being an up-standing citizen to a convicted felon in the slow blink of the reptilian eye of the sheriff. From moment to moment the novelty just grew. He remembered thinking when Louise Monroe was ques-tioning him that it was interesting to be on the other side. "Inter-esting"--there was that word, he had obviously activated the Chinese curse yesterday.

When he came out of the court, he phoned Julia on her mo-bile to tell her he was a free man again. He'd expected to get her voice mail, he thought he remembered her saying that she had a preview at eleven--but she answered, sounding sleepy as if he'd woken her up. "Oh, gosh, sweetie, are you okay?"This morning there was genuine and touching concern for his welfare in her voice, whereas last night there had been un-Julia-like defeat when he phoned to tell her what had happened.

"Arrested? What a wag you are, Jackson," she had sighed.

"No, really--arrested and charged," he said. Wag? What kind of a word was that?

"For brawling?"

"I believe the technical term is 'assault.' I'm up before the sher-iff in the morning, I have to stay in jail overnight."

"For God's sake, Jackson, do you have to go looking for trou-ble?"

"I didn't go looking for it, it found me all of its own accord. Are you going to ask me if I'm all right?"

"Are you all right?"

"Well, my hand hurts like hell, and I'm wondering if I've got at least one cracked rib."

"Well, that's what happens when you go in for tomfoolery."

Tomfoolery? His predicament seemed to have brought out the (even more) bizarre elements of her vocabulary. He thought she would be sympathetic, but she had more or less put the phone down on him, although he supposed he had woken her up in what was the middle of the night by the time he'd been charged and processed. He thought that perhaps she might have left him a nice message on his phone while it waited for him, with his other belongings, but there was nothing.

He knew that whatever happened he mustn't mention the dog to Julia.

“You killed a dog, Jackson?"

"No! The dog just died, I didn't kill it."

"You killed it with the power of your thoughts?"

"No! It had a heart attack, or a stroke, maybe, I'm not sure." He heard Julia light up a cigarette and drag hard on it. Her accordion lungs going in and out, wheezing their sickly tune.

He had watched in paralyzed horror as the snarling dog had lumbered toward him, like an overweight gymnast going for the vaulting horse, and thought, Holy Mother of God, because divine intervention seemed the only thing that could rescue him. He steadied himself, reminded himself of the drill, Grab its legs, pull it apart, and, lo and behold, the Virgin Mary herself must have interceded on his behalf, because just as the furious beast reached him, it dropped at his feet like a balloon that had been pricked. Jackson stared at it in dumbfounded astonishment, waiting for it to pull itself together and carry on ripping him apart with its teeth, but there wasn't even a twitch in its tail left. Honda Man roared with some horrible inner dog-loving pain and fell to his knees next to the animal, and even though the guy was a crazy, enraged psychopath, Jackson couldn't help but feel a twinge of sympathy for someone in the throes of so much grief.

He scratched his head, Stan to Honda Man's Ollie, and wondered what to do. Running seemed like a good option, but somehow it didn't seem right to just walk away. Before he could decide on the right course of action--kill Honda Man or comfort him-- a policeman arrived on the scene. They may have been in a dark backwater of an alley, but they were close to the Royal Mile and had been making enough noise to wake poor old Greyfriar's Bobby, sleeping the big sleep no more than a stick's throw away. So shouting did work, he must remember to emphasize this fact to Marlee. And Julia.

Jackson supposed that, through a policeman's eye, it didn't look good--Honda Man on the ground, his nose a mashed-up mess, sobbing over his dead dog, Jackson standing over them both, scratching his head in bemusement, his mouth almost dripping with blood that wasn't his own. Perhaps he should have just put his hands up and said, "It's a fair cop, you've got me bang to rights, officer," but he didn't, he protested a great deal ("It was self-defense, he attacked me, he's insane") and ended up being cuffed and forced into the back of a squad car.

His appearance in court this morning had been swift and bru-tal. The arresting officer read out a statement to the effect that he had come across "Mr. Terence Smith" on the ground in a pool of blood, sobbing over the body of his dog. The victim accused the defendant of killing the dog, but there were no visible marks on the dog. The defendant appeared to have bitten Mr. Smith's nose.

"Mr. Smith" himself made an almost credible victim--sharp-suited in Hugo Boss, his nose purple and swollen in a way that clearly incriminated Jackson. He had been a man going about his own business, walking his dog. Walking his dog--was there any more innocent pastime that a citizen could indulge in?

Jackson had refused to see the police doctor last night, claiming he was "fine." It was stupid male pride that made him reluctant to admit to injury. "You are a visitor in our city, Mr. Brodie," Sher-iff Alistair Crichton admonished him, "and I am only sorry that this isn't the good old days when you would have been run out of town." Instead he fined him a hundred pounds for assault and told him to "watch his step."

“Why didn't you plead 'not guilty'?" Julia asked. "You're an idiot, Jackson." She no longer sounded sleepy, quite the opposite in fact.

"Thanks for the sympathy."

"And so, what now?" she asked.

"Dunno. Guess I'll try to go straight from now on."

"It's not funny."

"Unless you like the idea of being a gangster's moll."

"It's not funny."

Jackson could hear a door opening and closing and then voices in the background. A man asked a question that Jackson couldn't catch, and Julia turned her mouth away from the phone and said, "Yes, please."

"Are you in a shop?"

"No, I'm in rehearsal. I have to go, I'll see you later." And she was gone. She couldn't be in rehearsal, her venue was so far under-ground that no phone signal could penetrate the rock. Jackson sighed. Hard times in Babylon.

Chapter 18

Louise had to spend twenty minutes waking Archie up, if she didn't put the effort in he would still be in his bed when she came home from work. He had been in the shower for almost half an hour, she wouldn't be surprised if he'd fallen asleep again in there, he certainly never seemed any cleaner when he came out. She didn't like to think what other things he might be doing in there with his man/boy body. It was hard to remember that he had once been brand-new, as pink and unsullied as Jellybean's paw-pads when he was a kitten. Now he sprouted hair and stubble, erupted in spots, his voice was on a roller coaster, swooping and plummeting at random. He was undergoing some kind of unnatural transformation, as if he were changing from a boy into an animal, more werewolf than boy.

It was almost impossible to believe now that Archie had come out of her own body, she couldn't see how he had ever fitted in there. Eve was made from Adam's body, but in reality men came from inside women--no wonder it did their heads in. Man that is born of woman and is but of few days and is full of trouble. Sometimes you wondered why anyone bothered crawling out of the cradle when what lay ahead was so darn difficult. She shouldn't think like that, depressive mothers produced depressive children (she had read a clinical study), she had thought that she could be the one to break the cycle, but she hadn't done a very good job.

She drank coffee and glared at the urn that was still sitting on the draining board. Woman is born of woman. Perhaps she could just scatter the contents in the garden like fertilizer. There was hardly any topsoil out there--thank you, Graham Hatter--so for the first time in her life her mother could perform a useful func-tion. She realized she had bit her lip until it had bled. She liked the taste of her own blood, salty and ferric. She was sure she had read somewhere that there was salt in the blood because all life began in the sea, but she found it hard to believe. It seemed po-etic rather than scientific. She thought of an embryonic Archie, more fish than fowl, curled in his watery environment, tumbling like a sea horse inside her.

She sighed. She couldn't deal with her mother yet. "I'll think about it tomorrow," she murmured. The ghost of Scarlett passed through her, and she acknowledged her with a little salute. Good to see you, Ms. O'Hara.

It could have been the first murder case on which she was se-nior officer in charge, and instead it was turning out to be a mirage. The divers had gone in at first light and found nothing. She'd sent Sandy Mathieson out there to cover for her. Somehow she had known the divers wouldn't come up with anything. She would probably get hauled over the coals for wasting money and resources. She would like the dead woman to turn up, not because she wanted a woman dead but because she would like to prove that she wasn't a figment of Jackson Brodie's imagination. She wanted to justify Jackson. The justified sinner. Was he a sinner? Wasn't everyone?

Yesterday, Jessica Drummond had checked his credentials with the Cambridge police. Yes, he used to be a detective inspector with them, but he had left a few years ago to set up as a private investigator. "A gumshoe, a private dick," Jessica snorted (she really did snort). "Boy's Own fantasy stuff."

Eager beaver, Louise had heard Jessica called. She was trying so hard to become one of the boys that she looked as if she might have started shaving. Compared to her, Louise felt like a great big puffy pink marshmallow of womanhood.

Worse, Jessica went on, Brodie had inherited money from a client and buggered off to retire in France.

"How much money?" Louise asked.

"Two million."

"You're joking."

"No.Two million pounds from a very old lady. You can't help but wonder how much coercion that involved. Confused old lady changes her will in favor of some sweet talker. I think there's something wrong with our Mr. Brodie." She tapped her forehead. "You know, an elaborate hoaxer, misses being a policeman, having a real job, sets about making himself the center of attention. A fantasist."

"That all sounds a bit soap opera," Louise said. "And I didn't see any evidence of sweet-talking." Quite the opposite, if anything. He had two million in the bank and he was traveling on buses? He didn't look like the kind of guy who took a bus. "Not everyone has someone who'll notice they've gone." Was he talking about himself? He had looked right at her when he said it. Did he think she didn't have anyone who would miss her? Archie would miss her. Jellybean would miss her. Jellybean would miss her more than Archie. Archie would hole up in his bedroom, playing Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, watching Punk'd and Cribs and Pimp My Ride and ordering pizza on her credit card.

But then what, when the money ran out? He was a boy who could barely open a tin of beans. If she died before her time, then Archie would be an orphan. The idea of Archie as an orphan was a kick to her heart, the next worst thing to his own death (don't think that). But then everyone became an orphan eventually, didn't they? She was an orphan herself now, of course, although the difference between her mother being alive and her mother being dead seemed minimal.

For Archie's sake rather than her own, Louise hoped that she would die a natural death in her own bed when she was a con-tented old woman and Archie was completely grown-up and independent and was ready to let her go. He would have a wife and children and a profession. He'd probably turn out to be a right-wing investment banker and say things to his kids like, "When I was your age, I was a bit of a rebel too." She would be dead but everyone would be okay about that, including Louise, and her genes would carry on in her child and then in his child, and in this way the world was stitched together.

Louise could imagine being old, but she couldn't imagine being contented.

"Not many girls drown themselves, though, women aren't noted for drowning." She supposed Jackson Brodie was right. Not many women drowned, period. Louise made a mental list of women who had drowned--Maggie Tulliver, Virginia Woolf, Natalie Wood, Rebecca de Winter. True, they weren't all real, and techni-cally speaking, Rebecca didn't drown, did she? She was murdered, and she had cancer. The Rasputin of romantic literature--bad women need killing several times over, apparently. You could keep a good woman down but not a bad one. Louise had gone straight into the police after she graduated from St. Andrews with a first in English. Never a backward glance to academia, they had wanted her to do an MPhil, but what was the point, really? In the police you could be out there, on the street, doing something, making a difference, breaking down doors and finding small helpless children at the mercy of their drunken mothers. And you would have the power to take those small helpless children away from their drunken mothers and save them, give them to foster parents, put them in an orphanage, anything rather than leaving them at home to be a witness to their own ravaged childhood. Jackson Brodie didn't seem like a hoaxer, but then that was the thing about hoax-ers and con men, wasn't it, they were plausible. Perhaps he had fallen in the water and panicked, hallucinated, made something out of nothing. Invented a corpse out of malice or delusion or plain old insanity. He'd wrong-footed her at first by being so professional-- his description of the body and the circumstances in which it was found was what she would expect from one of her team--but who was to say he wasn't a pathological liar? He had taken photographs but there was no sign of a camera, he had found a card but it had disappeared, he had tried to pull a dead woman from the water but there was no body. It was all very shaky.

He could have gone over earlier, left his jacket, and then sim-ply entered the water from Cramond, but as hoaxes go it seemed very elaborate.

Or perhaps there was a dead girl, and it was Jackson Brodie who had killed her. First person to discover the body--always a prime suspect. He was a witness, yet he felt like a suspect. (Why was that?) He said he'd tried to pull her out of the water to stop her from floating off on the tide, but he could just as well have put her in the water. Deflecting suspicion from himself by being the one who called it in.

She heard Archie stumbling down the stairs, falling into the kitchen, grunting something that was almost certainly not "Good morning." His face was raw with spots, his ham-skin looked as if it had been boiled. What if Archie didn't undergo a transforma-tion? What if this wasn't his pupa stage, what if this was it?

She put Weetabix in a bowl, poured milk on it, gave him a spoon. "Eat," she said. A dog would be more capable. Being four-teen meant he had slipped back down the evolutionary ladder to some presocial rung. Some men of Louise's acquaintance had never climbed back up again.

She wanted to talk to him about the shoplifting. She wanted to talk to him about it in a reasonable way, not losing her temper, not yelling at him, telling him what a stupid fucking idiot he was. Lots of kids shoplifted and didn't go on to a career of crime--take her-self, for example. Although she had, of course, gone into a career of crime, it was just that she was on the good side. Hopefully.

Maybe it was regular, maybe it was only once, she didn't know. Louise had been with him at the time, so she had to presume that it was some kind of rebellion against her, some psychological acting out. They were in Dixons in the St. James Center, celebrating her mother's death by buying a big flat-screen TV in anticipation of the insurance money. Louise had taken out life insurance on her mother years ago, deciding she would never profit in any way from her life, so she may as well cash in on her death. It was a small policy, she couldn't have kept up big payments on it, and once or twice it had struck her that if it had been really serious money (two million), she might have been tempted to knock her mother off. A simple accident, drunks fall down stairs all the time, after all. And a detective knows how to cover her tracks.

Archie had taken something stupid--a pack of AA batteries that he could easily have paid for. It wasn't about paying, of course. She was at the other end of the shop when the door alarm went off, and then a security guard ran past her, pouncing on Archie as he exited, laying firm hands on a shoulder and an elbow, turning him round, and propelling him back inside. The professional part of her brain registered the catch as businesslike and efficient. The unprofessional part of her brain considered leaping on the security guard's back and jamming her thumbs in his eyes. No one ever warned you about how ferocious mother love could be, let's face it, no one warned you about anything.

She thought about looking helpless and throwing herself on his mercy, unfortunately looking helpless was not one of her greatest talents. Instead she marched up to the pair of them, flipping out her warrant and coolly asking if there was anything she could do. The security guard launched into his explanation, and she said, "It's okay, I'll take him in, have a word with him," frog-marching Archie out of the shop before the security guard could protest, before Archie could say something stupid (like Mum). She heard the security guard shout after her, "We always prosecute!" She knew they'd be on tape and spent some anxious time afterward waiting to see if anything came of it, but nothing did, thank God. She could probably have found a way of making the tape disappear. She would have eaten the tape if necessary.

Outside, in the underground gloom of the multistory car park, they had sat together in the cold car, staring out the windshield at the oil-stained floor, the concrete pillars, the mothers hustling toddlers in and out of car seats and pushchairs. Oh, God, but she hated shopping centers. There wasn't even any point in asking him why, because he'd just shrug his shoulders and stare at his trainers and mutter, "Dunno."The artful dodger.

She could see that from his point of view it was unfair--she had so much power while he had absolutely none. A contraction of pain seized up her insides. Another turn of the corkscrew. That was love. As strong as the first time she touched him after he was born, lying on her chest like a barnacle, in the labor suite of the old Simpson Memorial Maternity Pavilion (now, at the new hos-pital, it was renamed "The Simpson Center for Reproductive Health," it wasn't the same somehow). Louise knew, at that first touch, one way or another, they were stuck together forever.

It seemed to her, sitting there in the car park, that he was as helpless now as he was then, and she wanted to turn round and punch him in the head. She had never hit him, never, not once, but she'd come close to it a thousand times, most of them in the last year. Instead she put her hand on the horn and kept it there. People in the car park looked around, thinking it was a car alarm. "Mum," he said finally, quietly, "don't. Please stop," which was the most articulate thing he'd said to her in weeks. So she stopped. It all seemed a high price to pay for a desperate, drunken bout of sex with a married colleague who never even knew he'd fathered a child.

She had a sudden, unwelcome flashback to the bump and grind of Archie's genesis. PC Louise Monroe in the back of an un-marked squad car with DI Michael Pirie, the night of his leaving "do." He had a new promotion and an old wife, but that hadn't stopped him. People used to think that the circumstances of a child's conception shaped that child's character. She hoped not.

"What?"Archie said, glaring at her, a mustache of milk around his mouth.

"Ophelia," Louise said. "She drowned. Ophelia drowned."

Louise went up to the bathroom and opened the window, cleaned the shower, picked up sodden towels, flushed the toilet. She wondered if he would ever be house-trained. It was blankly impossible to modify his behavior, she wondered what would happen to him under the threat of torture, perhaps she should sell him to science or the army. The CIA would find him a fascinating subject--the boy who couldn't be broken.

She put in her contacts, applied makeup, enough to have made an effort, not enough to be blatantly a woman, a white shirt beneath a trim black suit from Next, court shoes with a slight heel, no jewelry apart from a watch and a pair of modest gold studs in her ears. She would go back out to Cramond as soon as she could, join her team to dot the i's and cross the t's on the case that never was, but this morning she was due to give evidence in Alistair Crichton's court--a car scam, stealing high-end cars in Edinburgh and selling them in Glasgow with new plates. She and a DS, Jim Tucker, had worked doggedly to put a case together for the procu-rator fiscal, Crichton was an old bastard and a stickler for proce-dure and she didn't want her appearance to get in the way of her evidence. She had done Jim a big favor last year. He had a teenage daughter, Lily, one of those clean-cut types, thick hair, lots of good orthodontic work, all her grade exams on the piano. Lily had just triumphed in her Highers and was set to go to university on a Royal Navy scholarship to study medicine, and then Louise had helped to net her in a drugs raid on a flat in Sciennes. It turned out to be just a bit of dope, sixth-years from Gillespie's, and a couple of first-year university students, Louise had recognized Lily straightaway. They were all taken down to the station, and a couple of them were charged for possession. It was one of those jobs that looked like overkill afterward, lots of shouting and breaking down of doors, and in the confusion Louise had armlocked Lily and walked her out of the flat and hissed in her ear, "Scarper," and more or less pushed her down the stairs, into the night, and into her safe, high-achieving future.

Jim was a good sort, he was so grateful he would have cut off a limb and presented it to her in a glass case if she'd asked. Lily must be honest beyond the call of duty because she told her father about it, Louise couldn't imagine herself owning up at that age. Any age, come to that. Louise wouldn't have said anything to Jim about the bust, didn't think it was nice to tell tales. The way she looked at it, if Jim ever found himself in a similar situation with Archie, Archie would have a get-out-of-jail-free card and at least one member of the Lothian and Borders Police on his side. Two if you count his mother, of course.

She emptied half a packet of Tic Tacs into her mouth, and she was as ready as she ever would be.

Chapter 19

Richard Mott didn't wake. He lay untroubled in Martin Canning's living room in Merchiston. It was a large neo-Gothic Victorian mansion, with something of the manse about it. The front lawn was dominated by a single enormous monkey puzzle tree, planted when the house was still quite new. The house was masked from the road by ranks of mature trees and shrubbery. Nowadays the intricate cabling of the monkey puzzle tree's roots extended far beyond the front lawn, curling around gas and sewer pipes in the street and poking silently into other people's gardens.

The smashed-up Rolex on Richard Mott's wrist showed he had died at quarter to six (a flat line, appropriately), watched over by only the little red demon eye on the television set--the "fantas-tic" one that for a second he had hoped to barter for his life--and with nothing for company but the faint noises of the suburban world, growing louder as the morning wore on. The milk van had rattled its way along the street. It was the kind of affluent suburb that still had milk vans delivering glass bottles on the doorstep. The post had slipped through the letter box in a subdued way. In Lon-don, the day never began for Richard Mott until the post arrived. He always felt that days when there was no post (although there was always post) never really began at all. Today there was post, nearly all of it for him, redirected "c/o Martin Canning"--a check from his agent, a postcard from a friend in Greece, two fan letters balanced by two hate letters. Despite the arrival of the post, however, this day was never going to begin for Richard Mott.

It was the maid who found him. The maid was Czech, from Prague, a physics graduate. Her name was Sophia, and she was spending the summer "working her arse off"for a pittance. They weren't "maids," they were cleaners, "maid" was a stupid old-fashioned name. They were employed by a firm called Favors, and they arrived mop-handed in a pink van under the supervision of a gang leader who was called the "Housekeeper"--a woman who came originally from the Isle of Lewis and who was mean to all the maids. With agency fees and hidden bonuses, it cost three times as much to hire Favors as it did to have a cleaner come in a couple of days a week. So, generally speaking, the houses they went to belonged to people who were too rich or too stupid (or both) to think of a cheaper alternative. They had little pink busi-ness cards on which the strapline read, WE HAVE DONE YOU A FAVOR! Sophia had learned the word "strapline" (and the word "arse" and many other things) from her Scottish boyfriend, who was a marketing graduate.When the maids finished they were supposed to leave one of the little pink cards, after they had written on them, "Your maids today were Maria and Sharon." Or who-ever. Half the maids were foreign, most of them Eastern Euro-pean. "Economic immigration," they called it, but really it was just slave labor.

They were given a checklist of tasks by the Housekeeper. This checklist had been agreed on beforehand with the owner of the house and always said obvious things such as "Clean bathroom sink," "Vacuum stairs," "Change beds." It never said "Clean up cat sick," "Change spunky sheets," "Take hair out of bathroom plug hole," which would have been more like the truth. Some people were pigs, they left their nice houses in a disgusting state. "Spunky," obviously, was a word Sophia had learned from her Scottish boyfriend. He was a good source of the vernacular even though he was very shallow, but a great fuck (his words), which was what you wanted in a foreign boyfriend. Otherwise, why bother?

The Housekeeper usually drove them in the pink van and dropped them off and then did God knows what, nothing too strenuous, probably. Sophia imagined her sitting somewhere in a comfortable chair, eating chocolate biscuits, and watching Good Morning.

They had three houses to clean in Merchiston, all close to one another, so it was probably word of mouth--because whatever else they were, the Favors maids were good at cleaning. The house with the monkey puzzle tree (very nice, Sophia fantasized about living there) was somewhere they went every week. The owner was hardly ever there, when they came in the front door, he disappeared out the back door, like a cat. He was a writer, the Housekeeper said, so don't ever disturb any papers, any writing. It was the cleanest, tidiest house they went to, nothing ever out of place, beds made, towels folded, all the food in the fridge inside neat plastic containers from Lakeland. You could have sat in the kitchen and drunk coffee and read the newspaper and then left without doing any cleaning, and the Housekeeper would never have known. But Sophia wouldn't do that. She wasn't lazy. In this house she polished and swept and vacuumed even more because the writer deserved it for being so clean himself. And now also because the writer had a visitor who was a pig, who smoked and drank and left his clothes on the floor and, if he caught sight of her, said filthy, suggestive things.

He had offered money to one of the other maids, a sad Ro-manian girl, and she had gone upstairs with him ("to have it off"), and then he had given her only half the money and a signed pho-tograph of himself. "Wanker," all the maids agreed, Sophia had taught them the word, courtesy of her Scottish boyfriend. It was a very useful word, they said. But the girl was stupid to have gone with him. She cried for days afterward, spilling tears onto nice polished surfaces and using up clean towels. She was a virgin, she said, but she needed the money. Everyone needed money. Lots of the girls were here illegally, some had their passports confiscated, some disappeared after a while. Sex traffic. It would happen to the Romanian girl, you could see it in her eyes. There were rumors about bad things that had happened to some of the girls that worked for Favors, but there were always rumors and there were always bad things happening to girls. That was life.

Sophia liked to think that the writer wasn't too rich or stupid to hire a regular cleaner but that he maybe liked the impersonal nature of Favors' service. Sophia imagined that writers were peo-ple who didn't like to get too close to other people in case it stopped them from writing.

Today they were short-staffed because there was "flu going round," and the Housekeeper said, "Start on your own," so Sophia rapped on the door of the writer's house. She had a key, but they were supposed to knock first. She rapped again loudly, the writer had a good brass door knocker in the shape of a lion's head, and there was something satisfying about using it, like being the po-lice. When there was no answer, she let herself in with the key and announced, "Favors here," in a loud singsong voice just in case the writer was in bed having it off with someone. Very unlikely, no sign of a sex life with a woman or a man anywhere in the writer's house. Not even any porn. A few photographs in frames, she rec-ognized Notre Dame in Paris, Dutch houses along a canal-- tourist photographs like postcards, no people in the photographs.

He had a set of Russian dolls, matryoshka, the expensive kind. The tourist shops in Prague were full of Russian dolls these days. The writer's dolls were lined up on the windowsill, she dusted them every week, sometimes she put them inside one another, playing with them as she had with her own set when she was a child. She used to think they were eating one another. Her ma-tryoshka had been cheap, crudely painted in primary colors, but the dolls that belonged to the writer were beautiful, painted by a real artist with scenes from Pushkin, so many artists in Russia with no jobs now, painting boxes and dolls and eggs, anything for tourists. The writer had a fifteen-doll set! How she would have loved that when she was a girl. Now, of course, she had put away childish things. She wondered if the writer was gay. A lot of gay men in Edinburgh.

There was a shelf of his books in his study, a lot of them in for-eign languages, even in Czech! She had glanced through them, they were about a girl named Nina Riley who was a private de-tective. Put the gun down, Lord Hunterston! I know what happened out on the grouse shoot. Davy's death was no accident. Shite, as her Scottish boyfriend would have said. They referred to the writer as "Mr. Canning," but that was not the name on his books, on the books he was "Alex Blake."

All nice as it was every time. Scented roses from the garden in a bowl on a table in the hall. He always left ten pounds extra, tucked under the bowl, a generous man. Must be very rich. No ten-pound note today, not like him. The dining room unused, as usual. She opened the door to the living room. The curtains were closed, which they never were. It felt gloomy, as if there were a fog in the room. Even in the half-light she could tell that something bad had happened. She picked her way across the carpet, and glass crunched underfoot as if a bomb had gone off. She opened the curtains and sunlight poured in, illuminating the mess--the mirror above the fireplace, all the ornaments, even the pretty glass shades in the antique light fitting, all smashed to splinters and shards. A coffee table turned over, a table lamp lying on the floor, its yellow silk shade bent and broken. Everything upside down, as if elephants had passed through the room. Really clumsy elephants. The writer's matryoshka dolls were scattered everywhere, little skittles knocked flying. She picked one up without thinking and put it in the pocket of her jacket, feeling the smooth, round, satisfying shape of it.

Sophia had a funny feeling in her stomach, like when something very exciting was going to happen, something that had never happened before. Like the time she watched a huge block of flats being demolished. Boom! And a great cloud of thick gray dust, like a volcano erupting, like the Twin Towers coming down, only it was before the Twin Towers.

Then she cried out, "Oh, God, oh my God," in her own lan-guage. She made the sign of the cross even though she wasn't religious and said, "Oh my God,"again. They seemed to be the only words she could remember. The sight of the man on the floor had temporarily eradicated the entire database of Sophia's vocabulary, English and Czech.

She was a scientist, really, not a cleaner, she reminded herself, she should be able to observe dispassionately, objectively. She forced herself to move closer. The man, it must be the writer, was lying on the floor as if he had toppled over backward while at prayer. It looked like an uncomfortable position, but he probably didn't care too much anymore. His head all caved in, an eye popped out. Brain everywhere like Scottish porridge. Blood. A lot of blood, soaked into the red carpet so she hadn't seen it at first. Blood on the red-painted walls, blood on the red velvet sofas. It was like a room that had been waiting for a murder, waiting to ab-sorb it into its walls like a sponge.

She was getting used to looking at him now.Words were coming back as well--English words--she realized she could shout "Help!" or "Murder!" but now that she'd got over the shock, that seemed a little bit stupid, so she walked quietly back through the house and out the front door and into the street, where she found the House-keeper still unloading plastic buckets and mops from the back of the pink van and informed her that the writer's house wasn't going to be cleaned anytime today.

Chapter 20

"Iheard you killed a dog. You look like shit. Want to grab a coffee?"

Louise Monroe. Louise Monroe grinning at him and pointing across the road to the Royal Museum opposite the Sheriff Court.

"Fraternizing with the enemy?"

"They've got a good cafe in there," she said. She scrubbed up nicely--black suit, white shirt, heels. Yesterday she had been in jeans and a T-shirt, a suede jacket. He liked her best in jeans, but the suit was nice. She had good ankles, "turned on a lathe," his brother would have said. Jackson was a bit of an ankle man. He liked all the other bits that went into the making of a woman, but he particularly appreciated a good pair of ankles. It was the bad Jackson, obviously, who was thinking about Louise Monroe's an-kles, the evil doppelg?er who lay in ambush within his brain. Good Jackson, Bad Jackson. The pair of them seemed to be having quite a tussle these days. Jackson didn't like to think what would happen if Bad Jackson won. Had Dr. Jekyll won over Mr. Hyde? Which one was good and which one was bad? He had no idea, he'd never read the book, only seen that Mary Reilly movie, half of it anyway, on video--Josie's choice--before falling into a postpizza sleep on the sofa.

"I didn't kill the dog," Jackson said. "It just died. Dogs do die of natural causes, despite what everyone thinks. I take it you

haven't found her, then? The dead girl?"

"No, sorry."

"Not yet" would have been a better answer. She said "sorry" as if looking for the dead girl had been a personal favor to him rather than a police case. Jackson suddenly caught sight of Terence Smith leaving the Sheriff Court, a phone glued to his ear. "Hey, you," Jackson shouted, starting after him. Louise Monroe caught his sleeve and held him back, saying, "Easy, tiger, you don't want to end up straight back in court." Terence Smith gave him a two-finger salute and stepped into a taxi.

"Lying bastard," Jackson muttered.

"That's what they all say."

“So you pleaded guilty even though you were innocent?" Louise Monroe mused over a latte while Jackson downed a triple espresso like medicine. "You must be a Catholic."

"My mother was Irish," Jackson said. "She was very religious, I was a disappointment to her." "I'm a Scottish Catholic, that's a double whammy--all the same crap but a chip welded on the shoulder as well." "And were you a disappointment to your mother?" Jackson asked.

"No. She was a disappointment to me."

"It just seemed easier to plead guilty."

"And that makes perfect sense where you come from, Mr. Brodie, in Topsy-Turvy Land?"

Mr. Brodie. That's how Julia used to address him, in the early days, making his surname suggestive and intimate as if he were a character in a Regency romance. Now she said "Jackson" sharply, like someone who knew him too well.

"I just thought it would be quicker, rather than going to trial and having to come back, get a solicitor, all that rigmarole. I had no witnesses, the guy was injured, and I never mentioned my own injuries when I was charged." He held out his hand for her to see, deciding against lifting his shirt and displaying his other purple trophies in the genteel environment of the museum. "My sword hand," he said ruefully.

"He stamped on your hand?" she asked. "When you were on the ground? And you didn't plead self-defense? You're an idiot."

"So I'm told."

"You're an ex-policeman, a man of previously good character, it's your first offense."

"I've crossed over to the dark side."

"Why?"

"I wanted to know what it was like."

"And?"

"Dark." He sighed and winced at the pain in his ribs. He had enough of this conversation. "What about Favors?" he asked. "Find anything?"

"I put Jessica on to it yesterday. There's no entry in the phone book for them--"

"Surprise, surprise."

"Nothing at Companies House, no e-mail address, no Web site, and thousands of Internet hits for everything ranging from dog-walking to hard-core porn, although none that's obviously Edinburgh-based. Vice say they'd never heard of a sauna called Fa-vors, ditto a lap-dancing club."

"You should look for the pink cards--phone boxes, toilets, pubs, clubs." Jackson began to feel something he hadn't felt for a while, for a moment he couldn't identify it, and then he realized what it was--he was working a case--all the excitement of trying to put something together, of trying to get somewhere. ("Let's face it, Jackson,you feel unmanned.") "Have you asked the girls on the street?"

She said, "I can see your police antennae waving. Put them away."

She had bitten her lip so that it had bled, he could see a scar or a scab, indicating it was a habit. She looked so in control, yet the whole drawing-your-own-blood thing hinted at all kinds of inner neuroses. He thought of the snake eating its own tail, devouring itself. He wondered what she'd been doing at the Sheriff Court. He didn't ask, instead he said, "The man who attacked me last night, Terence Smith, aka Honda Man, was involved in a road-rage incident yesterday. He was a maniac, completely out of con-trol. Viking berserkers come to mind."

"You saw it? What are you, some kind of professional witness, traveling around looking for crime scenes?"

"No, I'm cursed."

She laughed and said, "Who cursed you?" and he said, "I think I did it to myself." Because he was an idiot obviously. She looked like a different person when she laughed.

"I saw him take a baseball bat to someone in the street, and a few hours later the guy has a go at me, threatening me, telling me to keep my mouth shut about what I saw. He knew my name. How could he know that?"

"So you were the only witness to this road rage?"

"No," Jackson said, "there were dozens of other witnesses. He didn't see me, and he had much more reason to go after the guy who stopped him--some guy threw a briefcase at him. Maybe he's warned him off as well."

"Or maybe he was just a run-of-the-mill mugger and you imagined him threatening you."

"Imagined?"The way she'd been listening to him he'd thought she believed him. He felt suddenly let down.

"Look at the evidence," she said. "You say you witnessed a road-rage incident, you claim the alleged perpetrator of the inci-dent then assaulted you--although you yourself pleaded guilty to assaulting him--you claim you found a dead body, but there is no evidence to support that claim. You're a millionaire, but you're

hanging around finding trouble in all the wrong places. Let's face it, Jackson, on paper you just don't look good."

The unexpected use of his first name took him more by surprise than the reference to his personal circumstances, but then of course she would have run a background check on him. She wasn't the stupid one here, he was the one with the bruises and the crim-inal conviction. He said, "You've got blood on your lip."

Chapter 21

Martin was woken by the dawn chorus. Even with his brain furred by sleep, it struck him as unlikely, the Four Clans was the kind of place where no birds sang, and sure enough, after a while he realized it was actually his mobile rather than an avian choir.

He fumbled for his spectacles, knocking the phone to the floor as he did so. Even with his spectacles on, he felt as if his eyes had been smeared with Vaseline. By the time he had recovered it, the phone had ceased chirping. He peered at the screen--1 missed call. He went into the phone's call registry. Richard Mott. Richard was probably wondering what had happened to him last night, although he wasn't exactly the type who would care. He probably wanted the loan of something.

He put the phone down on the bedside table and found him-self looking at a woman being burned at the stake. Her mouth was open in a gulping howl of oval as the flames from the piles of wood surrounding her began to catch at her body. It was a print of a woodcut hanging on the wall. OLD EDINBURGH, a label beneath it declared. When they drained the Nor Loch to make Princes Street Gardens, they discovered it was not just the reposi-tory of the town's sewage and refuse but also the final resting place of the town's witches--their trussed-up skeletons tied thumbs-to-toes like birds ready for roasting. And those were the innocent ones, the ones who sank. Martin had never understood that--you would think that innocence would be an airy substance that would make you float, that evil would be heavy, sinking you to the bottom to the slimy, stinking mud.

Now, on the site of the witch burnings, there was an expensive restaurant where the cream of the Edinburgh bourgeoisie dined. That was what the world was like, things improved but they didn't get better.

Martin's neck ached, and his limbs felt as if they'd been tied up in knots all night, as if he himself had been trussed. He was in the bed, but he had no recollection of lying down next to Paul Bradley. No recollection of removing his spectacles or his shoes. He was relieved that he was still fully dressed. The smell of frying bacon penetrated the room and made him feel sick. He peered at the digital clock on the radio next to the bed--twelve o'clock, he couldn't believe he'd slept so long. Of Paul Bradley there was no sign--no holdall, no jacket, nothing--the man might never have existed. He remembered the gun, and his heart gave a little flip. He had spent the night in a hotel room (in the same bed!) with a complete stranger and a gun. An assassin.

He unfolded his body cautiously and lowered his legs to the floor. A spasm in his lower back stopped him, and he had to wait for it to pass before he could stand up and wobble on jelly legs to the bathroom. The inside of his mouth felt like cardboard and his head seemed enormous, too heavy for the stalk of his neck. He felt as if he'd been given an anaesthetic, and for one paranoid mo-ment his heartbeat spiked as he wondered if Paul Bradley had been part of some complex scam to harvest organs off innocent by-standers. Or carbon-monoxide poisoning? The beginning of the famous summer "flu" or the end of an Irn-Bru hangover?

He slaked an outrageous thirst with chemical-tasting water from the tap and checked himself in the bathroom mirror, but he couldn't find any visible operation scars. Rohypnol? Date rape? (Surely he would know?) Something had happened to him, but he had no idea what. Had he been given some mind-altering drug that was making him mad? But why would anyone want to do that? Unless it was the gods who were going to destroy him next. They had bided their time, it was more than a year since Russia, since the incident.

The last day, their guide, Mariya, had let them loose in a market somewhere behind Nevsky Prospekt, where there was stall after stall displaying tourist wares--nesting Russian dolls, lacquered boxes, painted eggs, Communist memorabilia, and fur hats deco-rated with Red Army badges. But mostly there were dolls, thou-sands of dolls, legions upon legions of matryoshka, not just the ones you could see but also the ones you couldn't--dolls within dolls, endlessly replicating and diminishing, like an infinite series of mirrors. Martin imagined writing a story, a Borges-like construction where each story contained the kernel of the next and so on. Not Nina Riley, obviously--linear narratives were as much as she could cope with--but rather something with intellectual cachet (something good).

Martin had never given matryoshka much thought before, but here in St. Petersburg their ranks seemed omnipresent and un-avoidable. His fellow travelers on the tour, overnight connoisseurs of Russian folk art, chatted all the time about which kind they were going to buy to take home. They speculated about how much doll they were going to get for their ruble, and the general feeling was that the Russians were out to rip them off but that they would do everything they could to rip the Russians off in return. "They've embraced capitalism," one man said, "so they can take the bloody consequences." Martin couldn't tell if "bloody" was being used as an expletive or merely a descriptive. Martin had noticed before on these kinds of trips that they tended to gener-ate a good deal of xenophobia, so that even when experiencing and enjoying the Wonders of Prague or the Beauties of Bordeaux, the tourists regarded the inhabitants of those places as hostile mis-creants, the tourists being little Britishers fighting a permanent rearguard action.

The shop in the foyer of their cockroach-infested hotel--hot, brightly lit, its walls mirrored with glass--sold dolls with inflated price tags attached. No one ever bought anything in the shop, and Martin spent an evening hour in there, browsing beneath the disappointed eye of the woman in charge ("Just looking," he mur-mured apologetically), studying, evaluating, and comparing dolls in readiness for the reality of a raw retail transaction out on the streets of St. Petersburg. There were big ones and small ones, tall ones and squat ones, but the features always seemed to be the same, little pouty rosebud mouths and big blue eyes, with eyelids fixed open in a permanent stare of sex-doll horror.

There were also dolls in the shape of cats, dogs, frogs, there were American presidents and Soviet leaders, there were five-doll sets and fifty-doll sets, there were cosmonauts and clowns, there were crudely made dolls and ones that had been exquisitely painted by real artists. By the time he left the hotel shop, Martin felt dizzy, his eyes swimming with endless reflections of dolls' faces, and when he went to his narrow, uncomfortable bed, he dreamed he was being watched by a giant Masonic eye in the sky that turned into the eye painted at the bottom of his grandmother's chamber pot, with its prurient inscription, WHAT I SEE I'LL NEVER TELL. He woke up in a sweat, he hadn't thought about his grandmother--let alone her chamber pot--in years. She had been born in a Victorian century and had never really left it, her working-class Fountainbridge ten-ement a dark and gloomy space draped with chenille and musty velvet. She died a very long time ago, and Martin was surprised that he remembered anything about her at all.

“Going to take one of those dolls home for my little grand-niece," the dying grocer said as they surveyed the rows of stalls. It was beginning to snow again, big wet flakes of early snow that melted on contact with tarmac and skin. It had snowed the day before, and now the streets were grim with gray slush. The air was hostile with a damp kind of cold, and the grocer decided to buy a fur hat with earflaps, haggling with the stallholder over the price. Martin wondered what the point of bargaining was when you were so near to death. He was beginning to wonder if the grocer really was dying or if he had simply made the claim in order to get attention.

Martin managed to give him the slip while he was entrenched in the negotiations over his hat. The man was ruining the Magic of Russia for Martin, that very morning he had trailed on Martin's heels through the Hermitage, complaining all the way about the excesses of the decor (but surely that was the point) and imag-ining what "god-awful pig swill" they would be served up for supper. Even the Rembrandts didn't shut him up. "Miserable old bugger, wasn't he?" he said, contemplating a self-portrait of the artist. Martin knew it could be only a temporary respite, no doubt the minute he had his new hat on his head, the grocer would ferret him out from among the souvenir stalls and spend the rest of the afternoon complaining about being taken to the cleaners by the hat seller, a scrawny man who looked as if he were going to beat the grocer in the race to scramble through the door to the next world.

Martin intended to buy a set of dolls for his mother, he knew they would sit, dusted but neglected, on a shelf among her other cheap knickknacks, the porcelain "figurines," the dolls in national costume, the little cross-stitched pictures. She took no pleasure in anything he bought her, but if he didn't buy her something she would complain that he never thought about her (her logic was indefatigable). If someone had given Martin a piece of rock wrapped in paper, he would have been grateful because they had gone to the trouble of finding the rock and wrapping it in the paper, just for him.

He would buy her something ordinary, he decided, because she deserved nothing better than ordinary--a little peasant set, aprons and head scarves, he was holding one in his hand, feeling its smoothness, its fertility-symbol shape, thinking about his mother, when the girl at the stall said, "Is very nice."

"Yes," he said. He didn't think it was nice at all. He tried not to look at the girl because she was so pretty. She was wearing finger-less woolen gloves and a scarf wrapped around her blond hair. She came out from behind the stall and started picking up different dolls, opening them up, cracking them like eggs, setting them out. "This one beautiful, this one also. Here this doll special, very good artist. Scenes from Pushkin, Pushkin famous Russian writer. You know him?" It was such a soft sell that it would have seemed discourteous to resist, and in the end, after perhaps more contemplation than either the task or the dolls merited, he bought an expensive fifteen-doll set. They were attractive things, their fat-bellied stomachs painted with "winter scenes" from Pushkin. Works of art, really, too good for his mother, and he decided he would keep them for himself.

"Very beautiful," he said to the girl.

"No dollars?" she queried sadly when he handed over his fist-fuls of rubles.

She was wearing ankle boots with a high heel and an old-fashioned, serviceable kind of coat. All the girls in St. Petersburg wore high-heeled boots, picking their way dexterously through the icy slush while Martin found himself slipping and sliding like a slapstick comedian.

"You want coffee?" she asked unexpectedly, confounding him with the question. He thought she was going to produce a flask from somewhere, but she shouted something harsh at the man selling old Red Army insignia at the next stall, and he shouted something equally harsh back, and then she picked up her hand-bag and set off, swinging her bag and beckoning to Martin as if he were a child.

They didn't have coffee. They had a bowl of borscht, followed by hot chocolate, thick and sweet, served in tall mugs, alongside some kind of custard pastry. She ordered it and wouldn't let him pay, waving her hand at the thin plastic carrier bag that contained his newspaper-wrapped dolls, snugly inside of one another now, so he wondered if this was his reward for having forked out way over the odds for his purchase. Maybe this was how business was transacted in Russia, maybe if you gave someone enough money to live off for a week they took you into warm, steamy cafes and blew their cigarette smoke all over you. On holiday in Crete once ("Discover the Ancient Wonders of"), he found that every time he bought something in a shop, the shopkeeper insisted on giving him something else for free, as if they wanted to soften the harsh edges of capitalism. These gifts usually took the form of a crocheted doily so that Martin had quite a pile of them in his suit-case by the time he returned home. He gave them to an Oxfam shop.

"Irina," she said, sticking out her hand and shaking his. When she unwrapped her scarf, her hair fell down her back.

"Martin," Martin said.

"Marty," she said, smiling at him. He didn't correct her mistake. No one had ever called him "Marty" before. He liked the way "Marty" seemed a more entertaining man than he knew himself to be.

He tried to explain to Irina that he was a writer, but he couldn't tell whether she understood him or not. "Dostoyevsky," he said, "Pushkin."

"Idyot!" she exclaimed, her pretty doll face suddenly animated. "Here is Idyot." It was only later that he realized the cafe they were in was called the Idiot.

He wanted to impress her a little with his success. He never talked about his professional good fortune with anyone. Melanie, his agent, thought it was never good enough and he could do better, the few friends he had weren't in the least successful and he didn't want them to think he was boasting in any way, his mother was indifferent and his brother was jealous, so he had found it best to keep his small triumphs to himself. But he would have liked Irina to know that he was a person of a little consequence in his native country ("His sales build with every book"), but she just smiled and licked the crumbs of pastry from her fingers. "Sure," she said.

When she had finished eating, she stood up suddenly and, without looking at her watch, said, "I go." She drained her cup while shrugging into her coat, there was a kind of greed in the gesture that Martin admired.

"Tonight?" she said, as if they had already made an arrange-ment. "Caviar Bar in Grand Hotel, seven o'clock. Okay, Marty?"

"Yes, okay," Martin said hastily because she was already dashing for the door, raising her hand in farewell without looking back.

When he left the cafe he found it was snowing thickly. It seemed very romantic, the snow, the girl with blond hair wrapped in a scarf, like Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago.

He stared at his reflection in the slightly foxed mirror of the Four Clans' bathroom. Maybe he felt so nauseous because he was starving, he couldn't remember when he last had anything proper to eat. A shiver went through his body, and the next moment he was on his knees, holding on to the toilet bowl, being violently sick. He flushed the toilet, and as he stared into the vortex of vomit swirling with some nasty blue chemical that must be in the cistern, he was hit by a sudden thought:

Robbed? Of course!

He hurried out of the bathroom and searched for his wallet in his jacket pocket. Gone. He sighed heavily at the thought of all those tedious phone calls he was going to have to make to his bank and credit card companies. His driver's license and a hundred pounds in cash had also been in the wallet, and then--nightmare--he remembered the little lilac Memory Stick, the sliver of plastic that contained Death on the Black Isle. Gone. A cold wave of panic passed through his body, followed by a hot one of relief-- the novel was backed up on a CD in his "office." Martin had saved Paul Bradley's life, and in return he had stolen from him. Martin was so hurt by this betrayal that he actually felt tears pricking his eyes.

In the fug of bacon and tartan in the reception area, there was a sense of Marie Celeste-like abandonment. He rang the brass bell, and after a long wait, a youth dressed in a kitchen-staff uni-form appeared. With fantastic sluggishness he ran his finger down the register and confirmed that Paul Bradley had checked out.

"Nothing to pay," he said, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. "You're free to go," he said as if he were letting Martin out of jail.

Martin didn't mention to the boy that he had been robbed, he didn't seem like someone who would care. And why should he? Martin couldn't help feeling that somehow he had got what he deserved.

Chapter 22

Gloria woke early and padded quietly downstairs as if there were someone else in the house whom she might wake, although she was wonderfully alone. When Graham was here the house crashed and boomed with noise, even when he was still asleep in bed. Without him, the day fell into its own quiet pattern, soft col-ors and slants of light that Gloria never saw otherwise.

She felt the lamblike nub of the oatmealy Berber stair-carpet between her bare toes and the smooth glide of the red Oregon pine of the banister beneath her palm. She spared a thought for the hundred and fifty years or so of polishing that had gone into creating this satin, some by her own hand, not with Mr. Sheen but with a hard block of beeswax. Gloria had schooled herself to appreciate small joys, of which there were many in the house, a house that would be standing long after Gloria herself was in the ground.

Every day was a gift, she told herself, that was why it was called "the present." They were going to lose this house. It would be dragged into the whole sorry mess Graham had created, it would come under the Proceeds of Crime Act (she had been reading up about it online) and be taken and sold to make some reparation for all Graham had done over the years. A house of cards, that's what he had created, an illusion. His death or the Fraud Unit, whichever came soonest, would reveal everything, throw open the curtains and the shutters and let the light in on every filthy corner.

Gloria opened the French windows in the living room and stood for a few minutes, breathing in the early morning air, watching a sparrow hopping delicately along the fence. An ounce of brown feather and black bib. It would be nice to think that God's eye was on it, but failing that, both Gloria and the CCTV cameras would notice its fall. A magpie came swooping and chattering, and Gloria chased it off.

The house in the Grange ("Providence," named long before Gloria and Graham took ownership of it) had nothing in common with the jerry-built, overpriced rubbish that had made Graham rich. The houses Graham built had badly hung cabinet doors, imitation-stone cement fireplaces, and cheap contract carpeting. They were houses that smelled as if they were made from plastics and chemicals. Last year, Graham had talked about moving from their house in the Grange, he said they were "too rich" for it and he "had an eye" on an estate up north, acres of land where he could fish for trout and surprise unsuspecting birds by shooting them from the sky. Over the years, the Grange house had molded itself comfortably around Gloria, and it seemed cruel suddenly to shuck it off in favor of some cavernous pile in the middle of nowhere.

Gloria said she didn't see how you could be too rich. If you were too rich, you could just give some of your money away until you were just rich. Or give it all away and be poor. And they weren't really rich anyway, it had all been just smoke and mirrors, their lives predicated on dirty money.

She moved into the kitchen and made the first pot of coffee of the day, inhaling the aroma of the beans before putting them in the grinder. The Italian marble tiles on the kitchen floor were cold and inert, it was like walking on tombstones. They were incredi-bly expensive, but Graham had acquired them incredibly cheaply (naturally). Last year the house had been renovated, using the more qualified members of Graham's workforce. Among other things, they had knocked through and installed a vast American kitchen. "Nothing's too good for my wife," Graham said expan-sively to his architect. "How about it, Gloria--a larder fridge, a Gaggenau hob, one of the ones with an integral deep-fat fryer?" So she said she would like a pink sink because she'd seen one on a home show program on television, and Graham said, "Pink sink? Over my dead body." So there you go.

Gloria liked to visit any new Hatter Homes development. The farther afield the estates, the more of an outing these visits were, she might pack a picnic or find out where the local tearooms were. She liked to look round the show home, listen to the selling shtick ("This is a lovely room, a real family room"). Graham never knew about these little excursions.

Occasionally, Gloria posed as a prospective buyer--a wild-eyed di-vorcee or a recently bereaved widow who was "downsizing" into a husband-free apartment. On other occasions, she was looking at "family homes" on behalf of her daughter or a "starter home" for a son working abroad. It was harmless and it gave her the opportunity to open and close the cupboards and peer into the tiny en suites, only big enough for a malnourished person. Everything was built to the tightest specifications, as little garden as possible, the smallest bath-room--it was as if a very mean person had decided to build houses.

Before Easter, she had driven over to a development of houses in Fife. The builders had finally moved out, and the last of the res-idents were moving in, although there was still a show home and a sales-office Portakabin on site, and the flag still flew above their heads, emblazoned with HATTER HOMES--REAL HOMES FOR REAL PEOPLE. A flag of convenience.

She had felt particularly bad for the new householders because the estate was built on a landfill dump, and the gardens had been created out of a few inches of topsoil.

("But surely that's not legal?" she said to Graham.

"Caveat emptor, Gloria," Graham said. "It's the only Latin I've ever needed to know.")

Maggie Louden had been in the sales Portakabin and had regarded her with alarm. "Mrs. Hatter? Can I help you?" She looked different out of her cocktail clothes, more frumpish and decidedly less festive.

"Just looking," Gloria replied, feigning nonchalance. "I like to keep an eye on things." But her little day out was spoiled. She had been intending to pose as the mistress of a rich man who was planning to set her up in a house. The irony of the situation was not lost on her now.

Gloria had gone back secretly, at night, like a terrorist, and left a nice pot plant on every doorstep. It hardly made up for a gar-den, but it was something.

Gloria sometimes wondered if Graham was building homes for families because he found his own family so unsatisfactory. They had been to see a production of The Master Builder at the Lyceum--Hatter Homes was some kind of sponsor--and Gloria couldn't help but make comparisons. She had wondered then if Graham would fall from a spire one day, metaphorically or other-wise. And he had. So there you go.

The coffeemaker hissed and spat and finally came to its usual fu-rious climax. Gloria poured her coffee and carried it through to the peach-themed living room and settled herself on the couch. She breakfasted on the remains of a packet of chocolate digestives. When Graham was here, they always ate at the kitchen table, he liked something cooked--scrambled eggs, an Arbroath smokie, bacon, sausages, even kidneys. While they ate they listened to Good Morning, Scotland on the radio, ceaseless disembodied chatter about politics and disasters that Graham considered important and necessary, yet it made no difference in their lives whatsoever. There was more to be gained from watching a pair of blue tits pecking away at a bird feeder full of peanuts than from cursing the Scottish Parliament over your porridge.

She turned the dial on the radio to Terry Wogan. Wogan was a Good Thing. The phone rang. The phone had been ringing at reg-ular intervals since Gloria had woken at five. She had already phoned the hospital to ascertain Graham's unchanged condition, and she really wasn't interested in speaking to all the people who wanted to know why Graham had disappeared off the face of the planet in the middle of the working day and wasn't answering his mobile. She let them talk to the answering machine, it was less taxing than lying.

While she stood in the hallway, listening to the latest message ("Graham, you old bugger, where are you? I thought we were playing golf today"), the morning newspapers clattered through the letter box.

What kind of person bites the head off a kitten? What kind of person walks into the back garden of a complete stranger, picks up a three-week-old kitten, and bites its head off ? And doesn't get pros-ecuted! Gloria dropped the newspaper to the floor in disgust.

What would be the correct punishment for a person (a man, naturally) who bites the head off a three-week-old kitten? Death, obviously, but surely not a swift and painless one? That would be like an undeserved gift. Gloria believed in the punishment fitting the crime, eyes for eyes, teeth for teeth. Heads for heads. How would you go about biting a person's head off? Unless you could somehow employ a shark or a crocodile to do the job for you, Gloria supposed, you would have to settle for simple decapitation.

The man who bit the head off the kitten was, according to the newspaper, high on drugs. That was not an excuse! Gloria had once smoked a joint during her brief period at university (but more from politeness than anything) and had imbibed a consider-able quantity of alcohol in her time, but she was sure that she could have consumed any amount of illegal substances and not felt the urge to bite the head off an innocent household pet. A little basket of kittens--Gloria imagined long-haired tabbies with ribbons round their necks, like something you would find on an old-fashioned chocolate box. Tiny, helpless. Innocent. Did chocolate boxes still have those pictures? She had bought a lovely painting on eBay, two kittens, basket, balls of wool, ribbons--the works-- but she still hadn't found the right place to hang it. And, of course, Graham said it was "twee," being more of an about-to-be-murdered-stag connoisseur himself.

There was a barbecue, "a family barbecue," in progress and the man strode in, uninvited, unannounced, and picked up one of the kittens from the basket and bit its head off as if it were a lollipop. Had the man eaten the kitten's head? Or just bitten it off and spat it out?

You could put the man who bit the head off the kitten into a cage of tigers and say, "Go on, then, let's see you bite the head off one of those." But then it would be wrong to put the tigers in a cage. There was a Blake poem about that, wasn't there? Or was it robins?

Bill, the gardener, announced himself with the muffled clanking and thudding of tools in the shed, as if he wanted Gloria to know he was there but didn't want to actually talk to her. His surname was Tiffany, like the jewelers. Graham had bought her a Tiffany watch for their thirtieth wedding anniversary. It had a red leather strap and little diamonds all round its face. She dropped it in the fishpond yesterday. All the fish in the pond except for one--a big golden orfe--had been gradually picked off by the neighborhood heron. Gloria wondered if the watch was still keeping time, ticking away quietly in the mud and green slime at the bottom of the pond, marking off the days left to both the big orange fish and Graham.

Gloria made more coffee, buttered a scone, switched her computer on. Gloria was good with computers. She had learned way back when it was the old Amstrads, with their black-and-green screens and infuriating habits. In those days she used to help keep the accounts for Hatter Homes. That was before the firm took off, when Graham was still following in his father's cautious footsteps, building small developments, the profits of one venture funding the building of the next. He was cooking the books even then, but the sums were still relatively small. Hatter Homes had remained a family business, owned by Graham and Gloria. It had never been floated on the stock exchange, never subject to rigorous external scrutiny. The auditing was done by his own accountants. There was a web of complicity stretching as far as the eye couldn't see, accountants, lawyers, secretaries, sales force (sales-force-cum-mistresses). Gloria herself had signed anything put in front of her for years--papers, documents, contracts. She hadn't questioned anything, and now she seemed to do nothing but question. Inno-cence was not ignorance.

Gloria had a nice little laptop of her own, hooked up to a broadband connection in the kitchen--which was where she spent most of her time, after all, so why not? Graham never used her computer, he did all his dirty business in the office. She could imagine him going on pornography sites, watching one of those webcams where a woman in a room somewhere (anywhere) in the world performed for him.

The only messages Gloria tended to get--apart from the odd missive from her children--were invitations to enlarge her penis or special offers from Boots.com. She would have liked to have checked Graham's e-mail, but it was password protected. Gloria had been worrying away at it long before the events of yesterday, but she hadn't yet come up with the open sesame--she had tried that too, along with every other word and combination of words she could think of. "Kinloch," "Hartford," "Braecroft," "Hopetoun," "Villiers," and "Waverley." Nothing. They were the names of the six basic models of Hatter Homes--the "Kinloch" was the cheapest, the "Waverley" the most expensive. The "Hart-ford" and the "Braecroft" were semidetached. Nowadays Graham built a lot more detached houses than he used to. People like de-tached no matter how small, the "Kinloch" was so tiny it reminded Gloria of a Monopoly house.

Next month Gloria would be sixty. She had heard someone on the radio say that "sixty was the new forty." She had never heard anything so stupid in her life. Sixty was sixty, there was no point in pretending otherwise. Who was going to provide for her in her old age? Whether Graham was dead or alive wasn't going to make any difference to the police and the courts, they were going to de-stroy Hatter Homes. Quite rightly, in Gloria's opinion, but it would have been nice if she could have salvaged a little pension for herself before they did. She imagined that somewhere there was a big black book that contained all of Graham's secrets, all of his money. The Magus's book. As with capitalism, it was too late to ask him about it now.

She gave up on the password and checked her online bank account. They had a joint account that was mainly for day-to-day bills and housekeeping. Gloria was entirely dependent on Graham for money, a shocking realization that had taken several decades to sink in. One minute you're sitting on a bar stool drinking a gin-and-orange, worrying about whether or not you look pretty, the next minute you're a year away from a bus pass, staring bankruptcy and public humiliation in the face. And sixty was the same old sixty as it ever was.

The housekeeping account was drip-fed automatically from a Hatter Homes account, whenever money was debited from it, more was credited, whatever went out one day was topped up overnight. It was almost like magic. No one seemed to have noticed the five hundred a day that Gloria had been siphoning off. Her nest egg. It was entirely legal, it was a joint account, her name was on it. Five hundred a day, every day except Sunday, Gloria's day of rest, monitored by her Baptist conscience. The new money-laundering regulations made it difficult to move large sums of money around, but five hundred a day seemed to keep her below the radar of both the Hatter Homes accountants and the bank. Sooner or later, she supposed, an alarm bell would ring, a flag would go up, but by then the accounts would all probably be frozen, and if there was any justice in the world, Gloria would be gone with her black plastic bag of swag. Seventy-two thousand pounds wasn't a lot to start a new life on, but it was better than nothing, better than what most people in the world had.

Gloria emptied Graham's belongings out of the bag and laid them on the maple wood draining board of the laundry room. His shoes, polished to a licorice-like shine, the jacket and trousers of his suit, the Austin Reed shirt, his expensive silk socks that someone, a nurse presumably, had rolled into a ball, the cotton vest and boxer shorts from Marks and Spencer--his underwear seemed particularly depressing to Gloria--and, last, his blandly corporate tie, curled limply at the bottom of the plastic bag like a dispirited snake.

It was strange to see his clothes laid out like that, flat and two-dimensional, as if Graham had suddenly become invisible while wearing them. Now they had all been swapped for a cotton gown that showed his Roquefort legs and his not-so-firm buttocks. The cotton gown would in turn soon be swapped for a shroud. With any luck.

Gloria had a sudden image of her brother's mutilated body when it had been shown to his family in the hospital mortuary, wrapped up in white sheets, like a mummy or a present. Gloria wondered which of her parents had thought it was a good idea to let their fourteen-year-old daughter view the dead body of her brother, nicely wrapped or not.

Jonathan had a place at college to do an HND and was working in the mill only for the summer between school and college. There had been several mills in Gloria's hometown when she was a child, now there were none. Some had been demolished, but most had been converted into flats or hotels, one into an art gallery and another into a museum where ex-mill workers demonstrated to the public the jobs they used to do in a past that was now officially history.

The week before her brother died, he had taken Gloria inside the mill. He was proud of where he was working, doing a "man's job." It wasn't dark and satanic, as she had imagined from singing "Jerusalem" in school assemblies, rather it was full of light and as big as a cathedral, a hymn to industry. Tiny strands and puffs of wool floated in the air like feathers. And the noise! The "clattering, shattering, shuttling noise"--she had written a poem later for her grammar school magazine "in the style of Gerard Manley Hopkins," thinking it might heal some part of the grief, but the poem was poor ("wool-dappled white air") and came from the head, not the heart.

There had been talk of prosecution after Jonathan's death--all kinds of health and safety laws had been flouted at the mill--but it never progressed beyond talk, and Gloria's parents lacked the passion to pursue it. Her sister (so recently dead) was twenty at the time and upstaged their brother by turning up in a pair of jeans and a black polo-neck sweater for his Baptist funeral. Gloria had fully admired her sister's gesture.

The only other time Gloria had been inside a real cathedral of industry was long ago, on a school visit to Rowntree's factory in York, when her class had marveled every step of the way, from the Smarties being tumbled around in what looked like copper ce-ment mixers to the packing room where women were tying ribbons around boxes of chocolates with (yes) pictures of kittens on them. At the end of the tour they had been given bags of mis-shapes of all kinds, and Gloria had returned home triumphantly bearing dozens of two-fingered KitKats that had, like Jonathan, been mangled by the machinery.

She took the phone from Graham's jacket pocket. What had Maggie Louden said last night? "Is it done yet, is it over? Have you got rid of Gloria? Have you got rid of the old bag?" Was that what she was--an old bag? Maggie Louden was well over forty, she'd be an old bag herself soon enough.

The phone had run out of battery power (rather like its owner). Graham's suit could do with going to the dry cleaners, but really, why bother? If he died, all of his suits were going to the Oxfam shop on Morningside Road, apart from the one he would wear for his funeral. This one might do, a bit of a brush and a press, no point in getting something cleaned when it was going into the ground to rot.

She plugged Graham's phone into the charger in the kitchen and carefully typed out a text to Maggie Louden. She tapped out "Am in thurso speak to you tomorrow g"--she was pretty sure Graham wouldn't bother with any punctuation or grammar, but then she changed it to "Sorry darling am in thurso speak to you tomorrow g" and then redrafted it a third time to "Sorry darling am in thurso not much of a signal here don't bother phoning speak to you tomorrow g."

What Gloria remembered most was that York was a town that smelled of chocolate whereas she came from a town that smelled of soot. Of course, you could no longer go on tours of Rowntree's, now it was owned by some multinational conglomerate that didn't want anyone inside their gates, watching what they were doing. Now that her sister was dead, Gloria was the only person who remembered her brother. It was extraordinary how quickly a person could be erased. Death triumphant.

She took a bag of birdseed from underneath the sink in the laundry room and poured it into a bowl. Out in the garden, she broadcast the seed around the lawn and, for a moment, felt quite saintly as all the birds of Edinburgh descended on her garden.

Chapter 23

Louise surveyed the corpse on the slab dispassionately. She considered it best to leave her emotions at the door when it came to postmortems. There were a lot of programs on television these days in which the police and the forensics all banged on about how a dead body wasn't just a dead body, it was a person. The pathologists were always addressing the deceased as if they were alive ("Who did this to you, sweetheart?"), as if the victim were suddenly going to sit up and give them the name and address of their killer. The dead were just dead, they weren't people anymore, they were only what was left over when the person was gone forever. The remains. She thought of her own mother and reached for the Tic Tacs.

The mortuary was crowded with the usual suspects, a photog-rapher, technicians, forensics, two pathologists--a Noah's Ark of postmortem specialists. Jim Tucker was standing off to one side, Louise knew he had a poor stomach for this kind of thing. He saw her and frowned, surprised that she was there. She gave him a thumbs-down signal and saw him mouth, "Oh, shit."

Ackroyd, the pathologist, caught sight of her and said, "You've missed a lot of the good stuff, stomach, lungs, liver."Ackroyd was a bit of a pillock.

The second pathologist on the sidelines acknowledged her with a little nod and a smile. She'd never seen him before. Only the most routine postmortems were done with one pathologist, two were considered necessary "for verification." One and a spare. "Neil Snedden," he said with another smile as if they were at a so-cial event. Was he flirting with her? Over a corpse? Nice.

"You here for her?" he asked, nodding at the woman on the slab.

"No, I need a word with Jim--DS Tucker."

The dead girl looked unhealthy, more unhealthy than just straightforward dead. Ackroyd hefted her heart in his hand. An assistant, a girl named Heather, if Louise remembered correctly, hovered nearby, holding a metal pan like a baseball mitt, as if the pathologist might be about to toss the organ in her direction. When it was placed, rather than thrown, on the dish, Heather took the heart away and weighed it as if she were intending to bake a cake with it.

Louise reached out and touched the back of her hand against the nerveless one of the girl. Warm flesh against cold clay. The quick and the dead. She had a sudden memory of her mother at the undertaker's, her face like cold, melted candle wax--the Wicked Witch of the West. Jim Tucker raised an inquiring eyebrow in her direction, and she gestured him to one side.

The dead woman's clothing was on a nearby bench, waiting to be bagged and taken to forensics at Howdenhall. The bra and pants weren't a matching set, but they both displayed Matalan labels. This was why you should wear matching underwear, Louise reminded herself, not for the off chance of a sexual encounter but for eventualities like this. The dead-on-a-fishmonger's-slab sce-nario where the whole world could see that you bought your oddly matched underwear in cheap shops.

"Working girl, found in a doorway on Coburg Street. Drug overdose. Vice knew her," Jim Tucker said. He dropped his voice. "What happened?"

"Crichton threw the case out on a technicality. Nonappearance of a witness."

"You're joking? He could have held off, asked us to find the witness."

"We'll go to appeal," Louise said. "It'll be fine."

"Shit."

"I know." Something caught her eye, on the bench with the clothing--a little pile of business cards sitting on a petri dish. "What are these?"

"Found in her pocket," Jim Tucker said. "The lady's calling cards."

Pale pink, black lettering. FAVORS. A mobile number. Just like Jackson Brodie had said.

"We thought maybe a call-girl agency," Jim Tucker said. "We've not been able to get anything from the phone number."

"She's got a call girl's calling card but you think she's a street girl?" Louise puzzled.

"She was a druggie, I'm guessing it didn't really matter to her whether she was in a hotel room or a doorway."

Louise didn't think that was true for a minute. If she was selling herself, she'd rather be doing it in a nice, warm hotel room, knowing someone knew where she was. "I've been looking for Favors myself, we've come up with nothing so far."

"Something I should know about?" Jim Tucker asked.

"Not really. A missing girl, but I'm not convinced she existed in the first place."

"Ah, your so-called dead body yesterday. I heard you called out all the troops for nothing. She hasn't turned up?"

"Not yet."

"What was that I heard about a body in Merchiston?"Ackroyd shouted across to her.

"No idea," she said. "That's Edinburgh South, nothing to do with me."

"I live in Merchiston,"Ackroyd grumbled.

"There goes the neighborhood, Tom." Neil Snedden laughed. He winked at Louise. Louise wondered if she could have sex with someone who was so twinkly in the face of death. She supposed it would depend how good-looking he was. Snedden wasn't remotely good-looking.

Ackroyd took out a small electric saw and began to slice the top of the girl's head off as if it were a boiled egg. "Look closely," he said to a green Jim Tucker, "this is the only time you ever really get to see what's inside a woman's head."

The sight of Jackson Brodie walking out of the Sheriff Court this morning had given her a start. That little flip-flap to the telltale heart.

Louise wondered what Jackson Brodie had been like when he was fourteen. Did he have all his virtues (and drawbacks) in place by then, could you have looked at the boy and seen the man in him? Could you look at the man and see the boy?

The pink cards existed. Louise had the proof in her pocket, the top one swiped from the pile while everyone was looking at Ackroyd performing his party piece. Okay, so it was tampering with evidence, but it wasn't as if it were the only card. At the end of the day, what did it matter if there was one less? Really?

She phoned Jeff Lennon, he was the guy at the station who knew everything. A DS a few weeks away from retirement, the face of a tortoise, the memory of an elephant. Handicapped by a bad knee, he was seeing out his last days doing a reluctant catch-up on paperwork, and she knew he would be glad of an excuse to do something else.

"Do me a favor?" she asked him.

"If you ask nicely."

"Nicely. Can you find out about a road-rage incident in the Old Town yesterday? The attacker drove off, can you check that someone caught the registration?" Jackson said there were "dozens of other witnesses," but when Jeff phoned back a few minutes later, it was to report that no one had remembered, although "someone thought the car was blue."

"Well, I'm the bearer of good news," she said. "Blue is correct, and what's more it was a Honda Civic, and I can give you a reg-istration, I've got a witness." She had called him "Jackson" to his face. It had felt unprofessional, even though it wasn't.

"Jeff? One more wee favor? Get me an address for a Terence Smith, in court this morning."

Jim Tucker had a dead girl carrying around with her a card for Fa-vors. Jackson Brodie had a dead girl carrying around with her a card for Favors. Jim's girl was definitely a prostitute of some ilk, therefore there was a good chance that Jackson's girl was too. She realized that she was thinking about Jim Tucker and Jackson Brodie as if they were equals. Write out ten times, Jackson Brodie is not a detective. He was a witness. A possible suspect as well, even if the charge was only wasting police time. And he was certified guilty of assault, even if he claimed he was innocent. Let's just say it again, Louise--he was a witness, a suspect, and a convicted felon.

Chapter 24

There was nothing like a night in the cells to give you an appetite. Jackson was starving, but raking round the cupboards of the tiny kitchen, he could find only dried-up instant gravy granules and some perforated tea bags that smelled herbal and repellent. That was something useful he could do today, find a supermarket or, preferably, a good deli, stock up on decent stuff, and cook something for them to eat tonight, something wholesome. Jackson's culinary repertoire consisted of five dishes that he could cook well, which were five more than Julia could cook.

He imagined how his local market in France would look this morning, overflowing with tomatoes, basil, cheeses, figs, and big, fat French peaches, ripe enough to burst. No wonder northerners were miserable buggers, evolving for thousands of years on har-vests of wet grains and thin gruels.

Julia hadn't looked as though she'd eaten at all yesterday, she'd had a "drink" with Richard Mott at lunchtime. Still, having seen him, Jackson now felt relatively safe from any rivalry with him, no way would Julia be attracted to anyone that untalented. The guy had died onstage.

Propped up against the kettle was a note from Julia. Her bold hand announced simply, See you later, love J. Her initial was accompanied by only one kiss and no exclamation points, she was a person who used exclamation points liberally, she said they made everything seem more friendly. Jackson thought they made every-thing seem startling but found that he missed them when they weren't there. He was being overanalytical, there wasn't much you could read into See you later, love J. Was there? The absence of ex-clamation points, the paucity of Xs, the initial rather than a name, the vagaries of time and place of "see you later"--see him later where?

She'd had a preview (but had she?) and then he remembered her saying that Tobias was giving them "notes,"he was sure she had nothing this evening. He could cook her penne pasta with pesto, a good salad, strawberries--no, she preferred raspberries. Some Gorgonzola, she liked that, he couldn't abide it. A bottle of champagne. Or would champagne feel too celebratory? Would it high-light the fact that they had very little to celebrate? When had he started thinking so much?

He had a shower, a shave, changed his clothes. He didn't quite feel like a new man, but he looked a lot better than the shabby criminal who had stood up in court. His face was unmarked, which was something to be grateful for. He would have liked to strap his hand up--more for aesthetic reasons than anything else-- but it wasn't a good idea to compress bruises. He'd done enough first aid in the field courses to know a few things about fixing peo-ple up. He flexed his hand a few times--agonizing, but it still worked. He would have known by now if there'd been any bro-ken bones.

His boots were still damp from yesterday, but there was not much he could do about that, he'd experienced worse. At least the boots and the bruises were hard evidence of the fight with Honda Man. The girl in the water, on the other hand, hadn't left a trace in his life. He was beginning to doubt his own experience. Maybe he had hallucinated the whole incident out at Cramond. Maybe he had wanted something to happen, something interesting, so he had fabricated it. Who knew what weird things the brain was ca-pable of? But no, he had touched her pale skin, he had looked into her sightless sea-green eyes. He had to believe the evidence of his senses. She was real and she was dead, and she was out there somewhere.

After fueling up on coffee and a proper breakfast at Toast round the corner from the flat, he set off to walk in to town across the Meadows.

There were a lot of people on the Meadows, none of them doing anything that could be called useful. Didn't any of these people have jobs to go to? There were Japanese drummers, a group of mostly middle-aged people (Scots, by their pallor) doing tai chi--Jackson didn't get tai chi, it looked okay on television when you saw people doing it in China, but in Scotland it looked, let's face it, arsy. There were some people dressed like extras from Braveheart, lolling around on the grass in a way that would have made William Wallace shudder. "Reenacters"--he knew that's what they were called. Julia had done reenactments for a couple of weeks last summer, playing Nell Gwyn for some National Trust place ("for a pittance and the oranges"). Julia "rented herself out by the hour" (her words) on any number of mundane jobs, from banqueting wench to bingo caller. All jobs were acting, she claimed, whether you were a prostitute or a shopgirl, you were in a role. "And what about when you're being Julia?" he asked.

"Oh," she said, "that's the greatest show on earth, sweetie."

He had another cup of coffee as he walked, dispensed from a kiosk that used to be a blue police box, a Tardis. It was a strange world, Jackson thought. Yes, siree.

Edinburgh was like a city where no one worked, where every-one spent their time playing. And so many young people, not one of them more than twenty-five, looking carefree and careless in a way that irritated him. He wanted to tell them that no matter how golden they were feeling now, life was going to disappoint them on a daily basis. It was going to wipe the smiles off their faces. Jack-son was alarmed by this surge of something bitter, the black bile of envy, if he wasn't mistaken. It wasn't his, it belonged to his father. He could hardly claim it as his when his own life consisted of nothing more taxing than doing laps in his turquoise swimming pool.

A young guy in one of those idiotic jester's hats was blocking the path in front of Jackson. He was practicing juggling with three oranges, almost as if Jackson had conjured him up by thinking of Nell Gwyn. Julia was perfect for Nell Gwyn, of course, her curvy, busty figure, her compulsion to flirt. She sent him a photograph of her in costume, her tightly corseted breasts, as round as oranges, although considerably bigger, being offered up to the camera in a way that was extraordinarily provocative. Jackson wondered who took the photograph. "What do you do when you're Nell Gwyn?" he'd asked, and she put on a kind of yokel accent, Devon or Somerset, and said, "Oranges, who'll buy my lovely oranges?

"Nell Gwyn wasn't really an orange seller," Julia said, "she was actually a bona fide actress."

"Just like you," Jackson said. It had possibly sounded more sar-castic than he'd intended. Or perhaps it had sounded as exactly as sarcastic as he'd intended. Julia would have made a perfect mistress for a king, a perfect mistress for any man. And a terrible wife. He knew that in his heart, that was what made it worse.

Stifling a desire to shoulder Juggling Boy off the path, Jackson scowled at him and said, "Excuse me," in a pointed, sarcastic tone. It would have been no trouble for Jackson to have simply walked round the boy on the grass like everyone else, but it was the principle of the thing. Paths were for people to walk on, not for idiots in hats to juggle on.

Juggling Boy said nothing but moved slowly to the side, his eyes never leaving the oranges. Jackson bumped into him as he walked past, catching his elbow, and the oranges went rolling in three different directions across the grass. "Sorry about that," Jackson said, unable to keep the pleasure off his face.

"Wanker," the boy muttered after him. Jackson turned on his heel and marched back, planting himself on the path. "What did you say?" he asked, sticking his face menacingly near the boy's. Adrenaline chased the bile in his bloodstream, a little voice in his head accompanied it, saying, Bring it on. He had an uncomfortable flashback to last night, to Terence Smith's jeering, ugly features.

The boy took a step back in alarm and whined, "Nothing, man. I didn't say anything." He looked cowed and sullen, and Jackson realized that the boy couldn't be more than sixteen or sev-enteen, almost a child (although Jackson had joined the army at that age, a boy soldier who thought he was a real man). He remembered Terence Smith yesterday, stepping out of the car with his baseball bat swinging in anger. This is what road rage felt like. Path rage. Jackson laughed, a sudden unexpected harshness that made the boy flinch. Sheepishly, Jackson chased after the oranges, picked them up, and handed them back. The boy took them gingerly, as if they might be hand grenades. "Sorry," Jackson said, and he walked away quickly to spare the boy any more humiliation. You bastard, Jackson said to himself, you total fucking bastard. He was turning into his enemy, his own worst version of himself.

Chapter 25

Martin filled up on petrol at a garage on Leith Walk. He had been relieved to find his car still waiting for him like a patient pony in the corral--his brain was in some kind of nervy overdrive, jumping terrible metaphorical somersaults. It took him half an hour to find the car, as Richard Mott's instructions weren't exactly helpful--"Your car's parked in front of Macbet on Leith Walk. Cheers, R," scrawled on the envelope that his ticket had been in yesterday. When he found the car, it was plastered with parking tickets.

At the petrol pump next to his, a small boy in the backseat of a Toyota was making faces at him, horrible, imbecilic faces that made Martin speculate the child was handicapped in some way. The mother was in the shop, paying for her petrol, and Martin wondered if he would dare to leave a child alone in a car. If the car was locked, it might catch fire (all that petrol), and the child would burn to death. If it wasn't locked, someone might steal the child or it might slip out of the car and run onto the road and be crushed under the wheels of a lorry. One of the compensations for not having a child of his own was that he wasn't responsible for making life-and-death decisions on its behalf.

If you were a woman and you couldn't find a partner, you could always go to a sperm bank, but what could a man do? Apart from buying a wife, he supposed you could pay a woman to bear your baby, but it was still a commercial transaction, and how would you ever explain that to a child when it asked who its mother was? He supposed you could lie, but you always got caught out in lies, even if it was only by yourself.

Perhaps he should have become a monk, at least then he would have had a social life. Brother Martin. He would perhaps run the infirmary, wandering in the walled herb garden, tending the me-dicinal plants, the bees humming gently, the tolling of a bell somewhere, the scent of lavender and rosemary in the warm air. From the chapel wafted the soothing sounds of plainsong or Gregorian chant--were they the same thing, and if not, what was the differ-ence between them? The simple meals in the refectory, bread and soup, sweet apples and plums from the monastery's own orchards. On Fridays, a fat carp from the fishponds. Hurrying through the cold cloisters in winter, his breath like white clouds in the icy air of the chapter house. Of course, he was thinking of a pre-Reformation monastic life, wasn't he? Another time, another place, a hybrid of the Cadfael novels and the "Eve of St. Agnes" rather than a historic reality. And anyway, there was no such thing as "historic reality," reality was this nanosecond, right now, not even a breath but an atom of a breath, the littlest, littlest thing. Before and after didn't exist. Everyone was clinging on by their finger-nails to the thread from which they were hanging.

His nameless, imaginary wife, a woman who had come with no price attached (although it was above that of rubies), lived with him in a cottage that was in a perfect village from which you could get up to London in an hour if you so wished. The cottage they lived in was chintzy and had beams and a lovely garden and was very like Mrs. Miniver's. Martin had recently watched the sequel to Mrs. Miniver--The Miniver Story--on early morning TCM and was still nursing an outrage that they had killed off poor Greer Garson for no reason whatsoever, as if there were no further use for her in the postwar world. Which there wasn't, of course, but that wasn't the point. And she hadn't even fought back against her un-named (but obviously cancer) illness, her only concern was to make her death no bother to anyone else. No sickness, vomiting, blood, and pus, no brain matter spattered round her living room, no raging against the dying of the light, she just kissed her hus-band good-bye, went up the stairs, and closed her bedroom door. Death wasn't like that. Death happened when you least expected it. It was an argument in the street, it was a crazy Russian girl opening her mouth to scream. The littlest thing.

His noble postwar wife knew, Miniver-like, how to mend and make-do, she knew how to soothe troubled brows and how to lift drooping spirits, she had known tragedy but she was stoic in the face of it. She smelled of lilies of the valley.

It was usually early spring, the sky pale and austere, the wind sharp, new daffodil shoots spearing their way out of their earth silos in the garden outside. It was also nearly always Sunday morning for some reason (probably to do with spending weekends in a boarding school). A leg of lamb (no animal was harmed in the making of this fantasy) was sizzling in the old cream Aga in the kitchen. Martin had already chopped mint, grown in their own garden. They sat in the living room, in armchairs covered in William Morris's "StrawberryThief "fabric, and each drank a small sherry while listening to a recording of the Goldberg Variations.This woman with no name harmoniously shared his taste in all music, poetry, drama. After they had eaten their lamb (with gravy and peas and roast potatoes), they had a homemade custard tart--a trembling pale yellow with a freckling of nutmeg. Then they did the washing up together at the old-fashioned porcelain sink. She washed, he dried, Peter/David put away ("The serving spoons go in this drawer, darling"). And then they shook the crumbs from the tablecloth and went for a walk, naming the birds and the early spring flowers, climbing over stiles, splashing through puddles. Laughing. They should have a dog, a friendly terrier full of vim. A boy's best friend. When they came home, flushed and fit, they would drink tea and eat something homemade and delicious from the cake-tin.

In the evening they made sandwiches from the leftover lamb and did a jigsaw together or listened to the radio, and after Peter/David was in bed they each read their books, or they played a duet together, her on the piano, him on the oboe. To his ever-lasting sorrow he had never learned a musical instrument, but in his imagination he was proficient, occasionally inspired. She did a lot of knitting--Peter/David's Fair Isle sweaters and rather effeminate cardigans for Martin. In winter they sat by a roaring coal fire, sometimes Martin would toast pikelets or teacakes on a brass toasting fork. He liked to read poetry to her occasionally, nothing too modern.

Then, of course, it was their own bed time. Martin wound the clock, checked the locks, waited while the woman had done whatever she did in the cold, slightly damp bathroom. One day, inevitably, this cottage would be modernized, bathroom suites and kitchen units, electric cookers and central heating installed, but now there was a certain sense of privation about it necessary to its time and place in British social history. Then he too would climb the stairs (narrow pine, a runner and brass rods) and enter their bedroom beneath the sloping eaves of the roof, where she would be waiting for him in a flower-sprigged nightdress, sitting up in their mahogany bed from a previous century, reading her book in a homely pool of light from the parchment-shaded lamp above the bed. "Marty, come to bed."

No, that was wrong, she never called him Marty. That was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Martin, she called him Martin, the ordinary name of an ordinary man whom no one ever remembered.

The mother of the boy in the Toyota came hurrying out of the garage shop, clutching crisps and cola and chocolate bars. She glared at Martin (for no reason at all as far as he could see) and passed the results of her foraging to the boy in the backseat before driving off in a haze of exhaust. The boy turned to face Martin and held one finger against the glass of the window in an unmis-takable gesture.

It was only when he went inside the shop to pay that he remembered he didn't have his wallet.

When Martin pulled up on the street outside his house, he discovered his driveway had been cordoned off with crime-scene tape and was being guarded by a uniformed constable. Martin wondered if there had been a fire or a burglary at his house, won-dered if he had inadvertently committed a crime--perhaps during those hours of oblivion at the Four Clans. Or had they finally come for him? Had he been traced through Interpol and now they were coming to arrest him and extradite him to Russia to make him face the music?

"Officer," he said, "has something happened here?" (Was that what people said--"officer"--or was that what people said on American TV? Martin still felt horribly befuddled.)

"There's been an incident, sir," the policeman said. "I'm afraid you can't go up to the house."

Martin suddenly remembered it was Wednesday. "It's Wednes-day." He hadn't intended to say that out loud, he must have sounded like an idiot.

"Yes, sir," the policeman said, "it is."

"The cleaners come on a Wednesday," Martin said. "Favors--it's an agency--has one of them had an accident?" Martin had only briefly met one or two of the pink-clad women who cleaned his house, he didn't like the idea of being there while they scrubbed and polished around him, servants doing his dirty business for him, and he always tried to escape from the house before they saw him.

Had one of the "maids" electrocuted herself because he had faulty wiring, slipped on an overpolished floor, tripped on a badly fitted stair-carpet and broken her neck? "Is one of the cleaners dead?"

The constable muttered something into the radio on his shoul-der and said to Martin, "Can I have your name, sir?"

"Martin, Martin Canning," Martin said. "I live here," he added and thought perhaps he should have mentioned that earlier in the conversation.

"Do you have any identification on you, sir?"

"No," Martin said, "my wallet was stolen last night." It didn't even sound convincing to his own ears.

"Have you reported the theft, sir?"

"Not yet."On Leith Walk he had turned his pockets out and found four pounds and seventy-one pence. He offered to write an IOU for the rest, a proposition that was greeted with hilarity. Martin, who believed everyone should be treated as if he were honest until he proved himself otherwise (a policy that frequently left him fleeced), felt surprisingly pained that no one would afford him the same grace. In the end the only thing he could think of was to phone his agent, Melanie, and ask her to pay with her credit card.

The policeman on guard outside his house gave him a long, level look and muttered something else into his radio.

An old woman walked by slowly with an equally old-looking Labrador. Martin recognized the dog rather than the woman as a neighbor. Dog and woman lingered by the gateway. Martin realized there were several people on the other side of the road-- neighbors, he supposed, passersby, a couple of workmen on their lunch break--who were all loitering in the same way, he was reminded for a moment of the spectators yesterday at Paul Bradley's bloody street theater.

The old woman with the Labrador touched Martin on the arm as if they were old acquaintances. "Isn't it terrible?" she said. "Who would have thought, it's so quiet around here." Martin rubbed the moth-eaten dog's head behind its ears. It stood foursquare, immo-bile, only a faint quiver in the tail indicating enjoyment. The dog reminded him of the push-along dogs on wheels that children played with. He and his brother, Christopher, had one when they were little, some sort of generic terrier. Their father tripped over it one day and was so enraged that he picked it up by the handle and flung it as hard as he could, through the living room window. That was regarded as acceptable behavior in their home. Not home--"home front" was what their father called it. That had been a dress rehearsal for his throwing their real dog, a mongrel, through the window of the living room in married quarters in Germany. The toy dog survived, the real dog didn't. Martin remembered throwing his laptop yesterday, was there something in him that had enjoyed that aggressive moment? Something, God forbid, of his father in him?

"And to think, no one heard a thing," the old woman with the Labrador said.

"Heard what? What happened?"Martin asked her, glancing at the policeman, wondering if he was allowed to ask, if there wasn't some great secret here that he wasn't allowed access to. Perhaps they'd discovered Richard was a terrorist--unlikely, given his complete lack of interest in anything that wasn't Richard Mott. Richard! Had something happened to Richard? "Richard Mott," he said to the police-man, "the comedian, he was staying with me, has something happened to him?"The constable frowned at him and spoke into his radio again, more urgently this time, then he said to the woman with the Labrador, "I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to move away, madam."

Instead of moving away, the old woman shuffled closer to Martin and said in a conspiratorial whisper, "Alex Blake, the crime writer--he's been murdered."

"I'm Alex Blake," Martin said.

"I thought you were Martin Canning, sir?" the policeman objected.

"I am," Martin said, but he could hear the lack of conviction in his voice.

An earnest man introduced himself to Martin as "Superintendent Robert Campbell" and walked through the house with him as if he were an estate agent trying to sell a particularly troublesome property. Someone gave Martin what looked like paper shower caps to put over his shoes ("Still an active crime scene, sir"), and Su-perintendent Campbell murmured softly, "Tread carefully, sir," as if he were about to quote Yeats.

In the shambles of the living room, Martin glimpsed a couple of crime-scene technicians still at work--studious and unremark-able people, not glamorous and good-looking like the characters on CSI. There were no technicians of any kind in Martin's nov-els, crimes were solved by intuition and coincidence and sudden hunches. Nina Riley occasionally resorted to asking advice from an old friend of her uncle's, a self-styled "retired criminologist." "Oh, dear old Samuel, what would a poor girl do without a brilliant mind like yours to call on?" Martin had no real idea what "criminologist" meant, but it covered a lot of gaps in Nina Riley's education.

The criminologist lived, in fact, in Edinburgh, and Nina had just been to visit him in his house near the Botanics. She was currently on page one hundred fifty, on her way back to the Black Isle, hanging from the Forth Bridge while the Edinburgh-to-Dundee train "thundered like a dragon" above her. Did dragons thunder? "Well, Bertie, this is quite a scrape we've got ourselves into here, isn't it? Thank goodness that wasn't the King's Cross-to-Inverness express train, that's all I can say!" From his living room there drifted the scent of offal. Was Richard still in there? Martin twitched, he found his left hand was shaking. No, no, Superintendent Camp-bell reassured him, the body had already been removed to the po-lice mortuary. The house had been polluted by the living Richard Mott, and now it was being polluted by the dead one. There was no reality, he reminded himself, only the nanosecond, the atom of a breath. A breath that was scented like a butcher shop. He was glad now that he had eaten neither breakfast nor lunch.

"How did he die?" Did he really want to know?

"We're still waiting for the results of the autopsy, Mr. Canning."

Martin was waiting for the right moment to say, "I've just spent a drugged night in a hotel with a man who had a gun," but Camp-bell kept asking him if he could tell if there was "anything missing"from the house. The only thing Martin could think of was his watch, but that had disappeared the day before yesterday.

"A Rolex," he said, and the detective raised an eyebrow and said, "An eighteen-carat oyster Yacht-Master? Like the one that Mr. Mott was wearing?"

"Was he? Do you think Richard was killed in the course of a burglary that went wrong? Did someone break in thinking the house was empty [because I was spending a drugged night in a hotel with a man who had a gun] and Richard came downstairs and took him by surprise?" Martin could hear himself talking like a Crime-watch presenter. He tried to stop, but it seemed he couldn't. "Did he disturb an intruder?"

"It has all the hallmarks of an opportunistic crime," Campbell said cautiously, "a burglar surprised in the act, as you say, but we're keeping an open mind. And there was no break-in. Mr. Mott ei-ther opened the door to his killer or brought him home with him. We estimate his time of death to have been somewhere between four and seven o'clock this morning."

A uniformed policewoman passed them on the stairs. There were strangers everywhere in his house. He felt like a stranger himself. The policewoman was carrying a large plastic box that reminded Martin of a bread bin. She was holding it carefully away from her body as if it contained something dangerous or delicate. "Crossing on the stairs," she said cheerfully to her superintendent, "that's bad luck. And all those broken mirrors downstairs," she added, shaking her head and laughing. Campbell frowned at her levity.

"We haven't found the murder weapon," he said to Martin. "We need to know if there's anything missing from the house that might have been used to kill Mr. Mott."

It seemed ridiculous to be using words such as "weapon" and "kill" in his lovely Merchiston house. They were words that belonged in Nina Riley's lexicon. "So you see, Bertie, the murder weapon that killed the laird was actually an icicle taken from the overhang on the dovecote.The murderer simply threw it in the kitchen stove once he had used it--that's why the police have been unable to find it." He sus-pected he had stolen this plot device from Agatha Christie. But didn't they say there was nothing new under the sun?

"We can't discount the fact that this might have been personal, Martin." Martin wondered at what point he had segued from "sir" into "Martin."

"You mean that someone came here intending to kill Richard?" Martin said. Martin could understand that, Richard could provoke you into murderous thoughts.

"Well, that, certainly," Campbell said, "but I was thinking about you. Do you have any enemies, Martin? Is there anyone who might want to kill you?"

A miasma of Usher-like doom seemed to suddenly rise up and fold itself around the house like a wet shroud. Death had stalked its rooms. He had a terrible headache. Death had found him. It may not have taken him, but it had found him. And it was coming to exact retribution.

Robert Campbell escorted Martin to "his friend's room." Martin wanted to say, "He's not my friend," but that seemed cruel and heartless, considering what had happened.

Martin hadn't been in the room since he had first shown Richard into it, saying, "If there's anything you want, just say." Then, it had been the "guest room," with a pretty blue-and-white toile de Jouy on the walls, a cream carpet on the floor, and a neat pyramid of white guest towels on the French sleigh bed, with a copestone of Crabtree and Evelyn's lily-of-the-valley soap. ("Are you always this anal, Martin?" Richard Mott laughed when he walked in the room. "Yes," Martin said.)

Now the guest room was like a doss-house. It smelled ripe, as if Richard had been eating takeaways--and, indeed, beneath the bed there was a pizza box that still contained a slice of old, cold pepperoni pizza and a foil container of something possibly Chinese, along with plates and saucers full of cigarette butts. The floor was littered with balled-up dirty socks, underpants, used tissues (God knows what was on them), all kinds of bits of paper that were scribbled on, a couple of porn mags. "He wasn't the tidy sort," Martin said.

"Is there anything missing from this room, do you think, Martin?"

"I'm sorry, I can't really tell." Richard Mott was missing, but that seemed like stating the obvious.

A police constable was rifling through a plastic carrier bag full of correspondence. "Sir?" he said to Robert Campbell, handing him a letter that he held gingerly by one corner in his gloved hand. Robert Campbell read it with a frown and asked Martin, "Did anyone have a grudge against Mr. Mott?"

"Well, he got a lot of fan mail," Martin said.

"Fan mail? What kind of fan mail?"

"'Richard Mott, you're a wanking wanker.'That kind."

"And was he?" Robert Campbell asked.

"Yes."

“Can I ask you where you were last night, Martin?" Campbell asked, his broad, friendly features betraying no indication that he held Martin responsible in any way for what had happened in his house, to his "friend." He sighed, a great deep sigh, the kind a very sad horse might give, while he waited for Martin's reply.

Martin felt a burning pain, like indigestion, beneath his rib cage. He recognized it as guilt even though he was innocent. Of this, at least. But did it matter? Guilt was guilt. It had to be assigned somewhere. Paid for somehow. If there was cosmic justice at work, and Martin was inclined to think there was, then at the end of the day the weights had to balance. An eye for an eye.

"Last night?" Campbell prompted.

"Well," Martin said, "there was a man with a baseball bat." It

sounded like the beginning of a story that could go anywhere-- and he was a champion player in the major league. Or sad--and when he found out that he was dying, he willed the bat to his favorite grandson.The shape that the real tale had taken seemed unbelievable in compar-ison to its fictional alternatives. In the end Martin didn't mention the gun, he could see it might be considered a detail too far.

Chapter 26

Bill, the gardener, appeared like an apparition at the French windows, giving Gloria a start. It had begun to spit with rain out-side, but Bill never seemed to notice the weather. Whenever Gloria commented on it, "Isn't it a lovely morning?" or "Goodness, it's cold today," and so on, he would glance around with a perplexed expression on his face, as if he were trying to see something invisible. It seemed an odd trait in a gardener, surely the weather should be part of his nature? She offered him coffee, as usual, although he had never in five years accepted. Bill always brought a khaki canvas satchel in which he carried an old-fashioned thermos flask and various greaseproof paper packets of food--sandwiches, Gloria supposed, and cake, perhaps a hard-boiled egg, all prepared by his wife.

Gloria used to prepare a packed lunch for Graham. That was a long time ago, when the world was much younger and Gloria took pride in making "traybake" cakes and sausage rolls and filling little Tupperware containers with lettuce and tomato and carrot batons, all for Graham to consume mindlessly in a lay-by somewhere. Or perhaps he just threw the contents of the little Tupper-ware containers in the nearest bin and went and ate scampi and chips in a pub with an eager-breasted woman. Sometimes Gloria wondered where she had been when feminism occurred--in the kitchen making interesting packed lunches, presumably. Of course, Graham hadn't eaten a packed lunch in decades, wasn't eating at all now, instead had mysterious substances added and subtracted from his body by tubes, like an astronaut.

Gloria wondered why Bill wasn't unwrapping his little paper parcels of food in the privacy of the shed. He cleared his throat in a self-conscious way. He was very small, like a jockey, and he made Gloria feel like an elephant.

"Can I help you with something?" she asked him. He was always "Bill," while she was always "Mrs. Hatter," and she had long ago given up saying, "Call me Gloria." He used to work for some kind of aristocrat in the Borders and was more comfortable in a mistress/servant relationship. Gloria almost expected him to tug his forelock.

She was distracted by the sight of a smear of chocolate on her white blouse. She supposed it was from the chocolate digestives she had breakfasted on. She imagined the little factory of cells that was her body taking in the chocolate and fat and flour (and prob-ably carcinogenic additives) and sending them off on conveyor belts to different processing rooms. This industry, dedicated to the greater good that was Gloria, was run on cooperative, profit-sharing lines. In this model Gloria factory, the cells were a cheer-ful, happy workforce who sang along to Worker's Playtime from a Tannoy radio. They were unionized and benefited from subsidized housing and health care and never became entangled in the factory machinery and mangled to death like her brother, Jonathan.

Bill's wife, it turned out, had a brain that was "turning into a sponge," according to Bill, and therefore he was going to have to give up coming on Wednesdays ("if you don't mind, Mrs. Hatter") and tend his sponge-brain wife instead of Gloria's garden. Gloria thought about mentioning Graham's present condition to him-- having a damaged spouse was the first thing they had found in common--but they had already had the longest conversation they had ever had, and she decided he probably couldn't bear any more.

The phone rang for the hundredth time. Bill didn't question Gloria standing patiently, waiting for it to stop. Gloria wondered what it would have been like to have been married to such a passive man. Infuriating, probably. Say what you like about Graham, he had given her a good run for her money.

After he'd delivered his news, Bill disappeared into his shed and, presumably, ate his lunch as usual, because thirty minutes later he emerged, brushing crumbs from his mustache, and began to aerate the lawn with a device that looked like an instrument of torture. Gloria made herself a cheese-and-chutney sandwich (gooseberry chutney, her own recipe, the gooseberries picked a few weeks ago out at Stenton Farm) and ate it standing at the kitchen counter and then went into the hall and listened to the messages on the answering machine. There were so many now that the latter ones had erased the earlier ones. Gloria thought this was how her own memory worked, except the opposite way round.

Everyone wanted Graham for one reason or another. His ab-sence was causing a rising tide of panic in the Hatter Homes' offices, already under mental siege from the Fraud Unit. "You've not done a Robert Maxwell, have you?" said the fraught voice of his sec-ond in command, Gareth Lawson.

Pam fluttering, "Oh, Gloria, can I have your recipe for Turkish cheesecake, I know I've written it down somewhere but I can't put my hands on it." It was a very good recipe--a packet of Philadelphia, a tin of Fussell's sterilized cream, and half a dozen eggs beaten together and poured into a caramel-coated mold and cooked gently in a bain-marie. It was the kind of recipe a person treasured once they had been given it. Pam would not be getting it off Gloria a second time.

A short barking, "Graham, still in fucking Thurso?" from Murdo Miller, endless "Mother? Mother, where are you?" from Emily. An abrasive West Coast voice that Gloria recognized as their account-ant, saying, "What's going on,Graham? You're not answering your mo-bile, you didn't turn up at our meeting yesterday." The stentorian tones of Alistair Crichton blared, "Where the fuck are you, Graham? You seem to have disappeared off the face of the fucking planet." Gloria thought that she wouldn't like to be a criminal appearing in his court. A judge who, if he were judged himself, would be found seriously wanting. "Justice has nothing to do with the law," he once remarked airily to her over a tray of canapes at some "do" or other. "Graham, why aren't you answering your mobile? We have to talk, do you understand? I hope you're not bailing out on me."

The phone rang before this message was finished, and the an-swering machine summarily ditched Sheriff Crichton and began recording the unhappy tones of Christine Tennant, Graham's long-suffering secretary of ten years. ("PA, actually, Gloria," she con-tinually, apologetically, corrected, but Gloria knew that if you typed and took notes and answered a phone, you were a secretary. Call a spade a spade.) Her usual rather whiny tones now had a near-hysterical edge to them. "Gloria, everyone's looking for Graham, he's really needed here. Do you know how I can contact him in Thurso?" Over the years, Gloria had occasionally wondered if Graham had ever had sex with Christine Tennant, she had been with him for ten years, after all, yet still seemed unnaturally enamored of him, surely only a woman suffering from unrequited passion could remain that fond of Graham. On the other hand, Graham was a man of cliches, and therefore sleeping with his secretary would be the kind of thing he would do. That would be a rather good epitaph for his headstone. GRAHAM HATTER--A MAN OF CLICHeS. You didn't have headstones if you were cremated, did you? You had nothing, an epitaph written on the wind and water.

Of course, the first thing you did when someone was missing was phone the hospitals, everyone knew that, yet it never seemed to have crossed the mind of any of these people who were so des-perate to get their hands on Graham, when all this time he was simply lying there on his catafalque in the ICU, hidden in plain sight, waiting to be discovered.

Gloria's eye was caught by something, a flicker in the rhodo-dendrons, a flash of something reflective catching the light. She reached for the binoculars that she kept handy for bird-watching. It took her a while to adjust the binoculars, but then the glossy green leaves came suddenly into focus, revealing a face, Ovidian among the greenery. The face melted back into the foliage. At any rate she was sure now that it wasn't a bear or a horse. Nor was it a woman metamorphosed into a tree, or vice versa. Gloria strode out into the garden, scattering sparrows in her wake, but when she reached the rhododendrons there was no intruder, only Bill uri-nating discreetly in the shrubbery.

The electronic gates swung open to let Gloria's red Golf out. She always felt as if she were making a getaway from a crime when she drove through them. She headed for George Street, where the parking gods found her a space right outside Gray's, where she bought a radiator key and a Stain Devil (for chewing gum, glue, and nail varnish) before schlepping along to the Royal Bank on the corner of Castle Street, where she withdrew her five hundred pounds for the day.

When she returned, Bill was packing up, putting his tools in the boot of his car. Although they had every kind of tool possible in the shed, Bill preferred to bring his own with him, some of them looked so old they could have been displayed in an agricultural museum.

"Well,"he said laconically, "I'll be going, then."Gloria supposed that if she hadn't returned when she had, he would have left with-out even saying good-bye. Five years and all she got was "I'll be going, then." Graham's last words to her had been something sim-ilar, she tried to remember what he had said to her yesterday morning. "I'll probably be late"--nothing new there, something about "the fucking fraud cops," and then "I'm off now." How prescient of him.

She should give Bill a farewell gift of some kind, she should have bought something in town but she never thought of it. She could give him money, but money always seemed an impersonal gift. From an early age, both Ewan and Emily had asked for money for their birthdays and Christmases. Gloria liked to give gifts, not money. Money was good but it wasn't personal. It was business.

Bill slammed the boot of his car shut, and she said, "No, wait a minute," and hurried inside the house to look for something suit-able. It was hard to know what a man of so few words might like, she considered a pair of dainty Staffordshire dalmatians sitting pertly on royal blue cushions--he looked like a man who might like dogs--or a nice limited-edition Moorcroft vase? Then she remembered him standing at the French windows one day--he had never once crossed the threshold in five years--admiring the stag at bay on the wall. She unhooked the painting from the wall, it was much heavier than it looked, and carried it outside to Bill.

He was reluctant to take it. "Worth a lot, Mrs. Hatter," he mumbled shyly.

"Not that much," Gloria said. "Come on, take it, God doesn't give with two hands." She thought of Bill's wife with her spongy brain. Sometimes God seemed to give a little with one hand and take away a lot with the other.

Eventually he was persuaded into giving a home to the doomed stag, sliding it into his boot on top of his tools before driving away for the last time. Gloria had neither liked nor disliked him, but now she felt a surprising pang of sorrow that she would never see him again. Even though they barely interacted with each other, she thought of Wednesday as "Bill's day." Monday was "hospice day," when Gloria put on a ludicrously cheerful smile and trundled a tea trolley round the local hospice--good china, homemade bis-cuits--everything nice because they were dying and they knew it.

Friday was "Beryl's day." It seemed now that Beryl would out-last her son. She lived in a nursing home just a few streets away, and Gloria visited her there every Friday afternoon, although Beryl had no idea who Gloria was, as her brain had also softened into a sponge. Gloria felt her own brain turning into something harder, less friendly, coral perhaps. They had seen "brain coral" on holiday in the Maldives when Gloria had made a timid foray into the underwater world of snorkeling. She had worn an old navy blue one-piece that she wore for swimming in Warriston Baths and was acutely aware of the way in which, from shoulder to hip, her body had taken on the prowed shape of a lizard's. Every other woman on the hot white beach seemed to be slim and brown and wearing a tiny expensive bikini.

They always took a tropical holiday in January--the Seychelles, Mauritius, Thailand--staying at the most expensive hotels, waited on hand and foot. Graham liked being a rich man, liked people to see that he was a rich man. If he recovered, if he lived, perish the thought, could he bear to be a poor man? Probably not. So Death might be a Good Thing for him.

There had been a lot of Russians staying in their hotel in the Maldives. The women were thin and blond and taken up with children, while the men were big and hairy and reminded Glo-ria of walrus, basking all day long in their gold jewelry, oily skins, and swimwear that was too tight. "Gangsters," Graham said to Gloria matter-of-factly. Gloria was puzzled as to whom the Russian men reminded her of until she realized it was Gra-ham. They out-Grahamed Graham, which was quite an achievement.

The last time Gloria had had sex with Graham was in the Maldives, on the tight white coverlet of the bed under a tropical hard-wood ceiling spiraled into the shape of a snail. It had been an awkward and slightly confrontational act.

Gloria wondered if anyone would visit her if she was in a nursing home, she couldn't imagine Emily turning up regularly with new underwear, hand cream, a potted hyacinth. She couldn't imagine Emily sitting opposite her, week in, week out, brushing her hair, massaging her hands, keeping up a one-sided meaning-less conversation. She couldn't imagine Ewan visiting her at all.

The phone was ringing. Gloria went into the hall and looked at it. It was developing a personality of its own--irritating and un-forgiving, not unlike the voice now shouting "Mother!" into the answering machine. The Evening News was poking like a tongue through the letter box, and Gloria tugged it out and glanced through it while Emily continued with her one-note, two-syllable chant--she had done this as a child, a repetitive mantra, "Mummy-mummy-mummy-mummy," but when Gloria asked her what she wanted, she would shrug and look blank and say, "Nothing."

"Mother! Mother! Mother! I know you're there, pick up the phone. Pick up the phone or I'll call the police. Mother, mother, mother, mother."

The last time they had all been together as a family was Christ-mas. Ewan worked for an environmental agency and had flown home from Patagonia. Working for the environment didn't mean Ewan was a particularly nice person. He was very self-righteous about the fact that he didn't want any part of Graham's business empire, which apparently was playing its own small part in the "global capitalist conspiracy." That didn't stop him from taking money from Graham whenever he was home. Ewan had always been a disappointment to Graham, never interested in the tenets of Scottish religion--alcohol, football, feeling badly done by-- that formed the backbone of Graham's faith. Graham was about to fulfill his lifetime ambition of owning a Premier League foot-ball team when fate tagged him yesterday--he had the unsigned contracts with him in his briefcase when he collapsed beneath Tatiana.

When Ewan had declared himself a member of the Green Party, his father's only comment was "Silly little fucker." Emily had no principles at all when it came to Graham's money. Of course, Gra-ham should have been grooming her to take over, she would have made an excellent capitalist profiteer.

Emily had been a lovely child, sweetness and light, a child who worshipped Gloria and everything she did. And then one day Emily woke up and she was thirteen, and she'd been thirteen ever since as far as Gloria could make out. She was thirty-seven now and married with a child of her own, but motherhood had, if any-thing, served only to sour her disposition even further. She lived in Basingstoke with her husband, Nick ("project development manager in IT"--what did that mean?), and devoted a lot of time to harboring grudges.

The main topic of conversation for both Ewan and Emily at Christmas had been how much their lives had changed, evolved, grown. Yet from one year to the next they expected Gloria to stay exactly the same. If she mentioned anything new in her life--"I've joined a gym" (she had tried, and failed, at a class called "Nifty Fifties"; after that there was "Sensational Sixties"; after sixty there didn't seem to be anything) or "I was thinking of doing French conversation at the French Institute"--their response was always the same: "Oh, Mother," said in an exasperated tone, as if she were a particularly stupid child.

Last Christmas Eve, when Graham was still a fully functioning member of the family and not yet an astronaut floating through space, she had been in the kitchen making the chocolate log, they always had a chocolate log on Christmas Day along with the pudding. Gloria made a roulade mix, no flour, only eggs and sugar but heavy with expensive chocolate, and when it was cooked she rolled it up with whipped cream and chestnut puree and then dec-orated it with chocolate buttercream, scored and marked to look like wood, and then sprinkled it with icing-sugar snow. Finally, she cut ivy from the garden, frosted it with egg white and sugar, and then twined it round the log before perching a red plastic robin on top. She thought it looked lovely, like something from a fairy tale, and if she had been still bothering with Weight Watch-ers, it would have used up all her points for a whole year.

When it came time to eat it, Ewan would say (because they were like actors with an immutable script), "None of that stuff for me, I'll just have Christmas pudding," and Emily would say, "God, Mother, that kind of thing is toxic to the system," and now that she had Xanthia she would add threateningly, "And don't give any to Xanthia either," because, of course, one-year-old Xanthia had been weaned on millet as far as Gloria could tell, and then, inevitably, Graham would say, "I don't know why you make that shite, no one eats it," and Gloria would say, "I eat it," and she would cut herself a big slice. And eat it. And every day after that she took it out of the fridge and cut another big slice until only the piece with the robin was left, and she would put that one out for the squirrels and the birds, but minus the robin, of course, in case the squirrels accidentally ate it. Or another robin attacked it, thinking it was a miniaturized, paralyzed trespasser into its terri-tory.

Their parts were fixed--Graham was the villain, Ewan took the role of worthy leading man, Nick was his long-suffering sidekick, and Emily was forever the adolescent ingenue, the moody daugh-ter whose life had been blighted by everyone else (apparently). Gloria herself was offstage, playing the woman in the kitchen. They wheeled Graham's mother, Beryl, out for Christmas Day, and she sat on the sofa, dribbling. An extra with a nonspeaking part.

"You have such a classic passive-aggressive personality," Emily had hissed at Gloria while she was basting the Christmas turkey. Gloria wasn't sure she knew what a passive-aggressive personality was, classic or otherwise, but clearly it wasn't something that was to Emily's liking.

"You're always so nice to everyone," Emily said.

"Is that a bad thing?" Gloria asked.

Emily carried on as if Gloria hadn't spoken, slamming down the tureen of roast potatoes onto the countertop. "But underneath you're so angry. And do you know something I've come to under-stand recently?" Emily had been having some kind of counseling, every Wednesday afternoon in Basingstoke, from a man named Bryce who was "reprogramming" her brain "into more positive patterns."

"No, what have you come to realize?" Gloria asked, wondering if hitting her daughter about the head with the basting spoon would reprogram her brain a lot faster and more cheaply than someone named Bryce.

"I've realized that I have spent my entire life not being me."

"Who have you been, then?" Gloria knew that she should try to be more sympathetic, but she just couldn't somehow.

"Oh, very clever, Mother. I haven't put my energy into being me, because my whole life has been defined by my terror of becoming you." Gloria didn't think of herself as a nice person at all, quite the opposite in fact, but she supposed these things were rel-ative--compared to Emily, most people were in line for canoniza-tion.

The only item on the Christmas menu that Emily had prepared was a starter of fig and Parma ham. All Emily had done was buy the figs and ham from Harvey Nichols' food department and put the ruddy things on a plate, but nonetheless her starter was given a rousing introduction--"Now this is going to be something really lovely for a change"--before being applauded to the rafters (by her-self) afterward. "Wasn't that gorgeous? Isn't it nice to have something different?" The starter had also come with a warning as Emily placed the plates on the table, this warning was directed specifi-cally at Nick, said with a manic kind of cheerfulness, "Now, dar-ling, don't you dare critique this." Emily had done an MA in literature at Goldsmiths, and it had made her into the kind of person who used "critique" as a verb. And applied it to food. She was "not getting on very well with Nick," she confided to Gloria in the kitchen, she had even been thinking of a "trial separation."

Horror clutched at Gloria's chest at the idea that Emily might move back home.

"For better or for worse," Gloria said, and Emily replied, "What--like you and Dad, staying together when neither of you can stand the sight of each other?" Children were not necessarily a Good Thing.

If they had known that it might be their corrupt, adulterous, fraudster of a paterfamilias's last Christmas, would they have done things differently? Gloria might have roasted a goose instead of a turkey, he liked goose, but that was probably as far as she would have been prepared to go.

Gloria sat on the peach-damask sofa in the peach-themed living room and drank tea and ate a sandwich she had bought in town. The sandwich contained mozzarella, avocado, and rocket. None of the ingredients existed in the museum that was Gloria's past. Gloria could remember a time when all you could buy was lettuce. Soft, limp lettuces that tasted of nothing. English lettuces. She could remember a time before mozzarella and avocado, before aubergines and courgettes. She could remember seeing her first yogurt in the corner shop in the northern town that had been her home and still was, even though she hadn't been there for more than twenty years.

She could remember a time when there was no take-out food, no Thai restaurants, when Vesta packets were the nearest you came to anything exotic. A time when food was herrings and mince and luncheon meat. She had mentioned to Emily once that she could remember a time before aubergines, and her daughter had snapped, "Don't be ridiculous," at her. She finished her lunch with a slice of Genoese sponge (the secret was in the addition of a spoonful of hot milk). She had already hung her Victorian kittens-in-a-basket painting in place of the gloomy stag at bay, although its ghostly impression was still visible, thanks to a faint outline of grime. It was only last year that the room had been redecorated, after the new security system was installed, but it never ceased to surprise Gloria how quickly dirt gathered. The kittens looked completely at home on the wall.

She was so far lost in the contemplation of innocent kittenhood that she wasn't aware of the lumbering shape that appeared at the French windows until it raised a meaty paw and knocked on the glass. Gloria nearly fell off the sofa.

"For God's sake," she said crossly, heaving herself off the peach damask and opening the window. "You nearly gave me a heart attack, Terry."

"Sorry."

Terence Smith. Graham's golem, formed from the slime at the bottom of a pond of lowlifes somewhere in the Midlands. Sometimes Murdo borrowed him to work on the doors or do bodyguard duties (Murdo's security firm looked after fragile celebrities when they made appearances in the capital), but most of the time he was simply Graham's pet thug, driving him around if he was too drunk to find the steering wheel--Graham refused to crush his ego into Gloria's red Golf--or hanging about in the background with the same air of doltish fidelity as his dog. Gloria fed cake to both man and dog and kept them away from cats and small children. There was no sign of the dog today. "Where's your dog today, Terry? Where's Spike?"

He made an odd choking noise and shook his head, but when he spoke it was to ask after the whereabouts of Graham, his puppet master.

"He's in Thurso," she said. It was funny, but the more she said that, the more it seemed true, in a metaphysical sense at any rate, as if Thurso were a kind of purgatory to which people were ban-ished. Gloria had been to Thurso once and found that to be pretty much the case.

"Thurso?" he repeated doubtfully.

"Yes," Gloria said. "It's up north." She doubted that Scottish geography was high on Terry's list of specialist subjects. She frowned at him. His face, always ugly, had acquired a new and disturbing florescence. "Terry--what happened to your nose?" He put his hand over his face, as if he'd grown suddenly bashful.

The phone rang again, and they both listened in silence to Emily's bleating. "Mother-Mother-Mother."

"That's your daughter," Terry said eventually, as if Gloria had failed to recognize Emily.

Gloria sighed and said, "Tell me about it," and, against her better judgment, went and picked up the receiver.

“I've been ringing forever," Emily said, "but all I get is the answering machine."

"I've been out a lot,"Gloria said. "You should have left a message."

"I didn't want to leave a message," Emily said crossly. Gloria watched as Terry lumbered down the path. He reminded her a little of King Kong, but less friendly.

"Mother?"

"Mm?"

"Is something going on?" Emily asked sharply.

"Going on?" Gloria echoed.

"Yes, going on. Is Dad okay? Can I speak to him?"

"He can't come to the phone just now."

"I have some news for you," Emily's less-than-dulcet tones announced. "Good news."

"Good news?" Gloria queried. She wondered if Emily was pregnant again (was that good news?), so she was taken aback when Emily said, "I've found Jesus."

"Oh," Gloria said. "Where was he?"

Chapter 27

Louise stared through the windshield at the rain. This could be a godforsaken country when it rained. Godforsaken when it didn't.

The car was parked down by the harbor at Cramond, looking out toward the island. There were three of them in the car, her-self, DS Sandy Mathieson, and eager-beaver Jessica Drummond. They had steamed up the inside of the car like lovers or conspir-ators, although they were doing nothing more exciting than talking about house prices. "Where two or more people are gathered together in Edinburgh," Louise said.

"Supply and demand, boss," Sandy Mathieson said. "It's a town with more demand than supply." Louise would have preferred "ma'am" to "boss," "ma'am" made her sound like a woman (somewhere between an aristocrat and a headmistress, both ideas quite appealing), whereas "boss" made her one of the boys. But then, didn't you have to be one of the boys to cut it? "I read in the Evening News," Sandy Mathieson continued, "that there aren't enough expensive houses in Edinburgh. There are millionaires fighting over the high-end stuff."

"The Russians are moving in, apparently," Jessica said.

"The Russians?" Louise asked. "What Russians?"

"Rich ones."

"The Russians are the new Americans, apparently," Sandy Mathieson said.

"Someone paid a hundred thousand for a garage last week," Jessica complained. "How insane is that? I can't even afford a starter home in Gorgie."

"It was a double garage," Sandy Mathieson said. Louise laughed and cracked a window to let out some of the hot air. The tide was dropping, and she caught a faint smell of sewage in the damp air. She never knew whether or not Sandy Mathieson was being funny. "Not" seemed more likely, he never seemed sharp enough to be witty. He was true to his name, from his gingery hair to his little beard to his giraffe-colored freckles. He made Louise think of a biscuit, shortbread or gingerbread, perhaps a digestive. He was a straight-down-the-middle type, married, two children, docile dog, season ticket to Hearts, barbecues with the in-laws on the weekends. He had told her once that he had everything he had ever wanted and would die protecting any of it, even the season ticket to Hearts.

"That must be nice," Louise had said, not really meaning it. She wasn't the sacrificing kind. Archie was the only thing she would die for.

"Where do you live, boss?" Jessica asked.

"Glencrest," Louise said reluctantly, she had no desire to start chatting about her private life with Jessica. She knew the type from her school days, winkling out intimacies and then using them against her. "Louise Monroe's mother's an alkie, Louise Monroe gets free school meals, Louise Monroe is a liar."

"That Hatter Homes development out by the Braids?" Sandy Mathieson said. "We looked at that. Too pricey, we decided."The "we" sounded emphasized, Louise noticed, underlining his little world. "Me and my wife and my two children and my docile dog." Not a woman on her own with a kid whose paternity had always been a matter for speculation. Sandy was a plodder, too unimaginative to be unfaithful to his wife, too stolid to rise above the rank he was at now. But he would always do the right thing by his kids, and he didn't dodge and weave with the truth, didn't seed favors-- a blind eye here, a deaf ear there. Wouldn't screw a DI in the back of a police car, too drunk to remember that sex was a biological imperative with only one goal. ("I'm pulling rank on you, Louise." Hilarious, how they'd laughed. Jesus.)

"It's a very small house," Louise said defensively.

"Still . . ." Sandy said, as if he'd proved some point about Louise's untold riches.

"Didn't there turn out to be some problems with Glencrest?" Jessica asked.

"Problems?" Louise said.

"Subsidence or something."

"What?"

"Real Homes for Real People," Jessica said. "Word on the pave-ment is that Graham Hatter's going down."

"'Going down'? You sound like an extra off The Bill."Yes, that would be Jessica, Louise could just see her going home at night, putting her clumpy feet up, eating a takeaway in front of The Bill. " 'Going down' for what?"

"Well, a little bird says they're after him for money laundering, among other things. But apparently it's huge, corruption in high places and all that."

"A little bird?" Louise said.

"I have a friend in fraud."

"Really? You have a friend?"

“Name me a famous woman who drowned," Louise said. Jessica gave her a worried look, as if she suspected this were part of some kind of intellectual hazing, some arcane knowledge that you needed in order to be in plain clothes. Her pudgy brow puckered with the effort of remembering something she didn't know in the first place.

"You see?" Louise said when no answer was forthcoming. "Women aren't known for drowning."