"I think I prefer I-Spy," Sandy Mathieson said.

All morning while Louise had been in court, her small "flu-diminished" team had been busy, mostly on door-to-door inquiries. Had anyone seen anything unusual, had anyone seen a woman go into the water, had anyone seen a woman onshore, had anyone seen a woman, had anyone seen anything? A negative on all counts. The divers had come up with nothing. Louise had watched them emerging from the water--"frogmen," they used to be called, you didn't hear that word used much anymore.They reminded her of The Man from Atlantis.

They were chasing a wild goose, a trick of light on water.

"I see dead people," Jessica intoned.

The only excitement in Cramond over the last few days had been an unattended car alarm and a dog that had been run over. The dog was making a good recovery, apparently. Fantastically low crime rate--that's what you got for paying a small fortune to live in one of the nicest parts of Edinburgh.

She had shown her team the pink card that she'd taken from the mortuary, didn't mention how she'd come by it, told them to ask around to see if anyone had heard of Favors, but it seemed the good burghers of Cramond didn't move in the kind of society where girls handed out little pink cards with phone numbers on them.

Louise had sent a couple of uniforms on a trawl of the cheap jewelry shops in town for gold earrings in the shape of a cross. "I can't believe how much nine-carat crap there is out there," one of them had reported back. More crucifix earrings than you might have thought, it turned out, but no one remembered a five foot six, hundred-twenty-pound blonde buying a pair.

The Girl with the Crucifix Earring, like a lost painting of Vermeer. Louise had seen Girl with a Pearl Earring at the Filmhouse, in the company of friends, two other single women. It was a film meant for single women of a certain age--muted, poignant, full of art, ultimately depressing. It had (briefly) made her want to live in seventeenth-century Holland. When she was young, she had often fantasized about living in the past, mainly because the present had been so awful.

"Who's on the Merchiston murder?" she asked.

"Robert Campbell, Colin Sutherland," Jessica said promptly. "High-profile celebrity murder gets the big fish high up the food chain."

"Celebrity?"

"Richard Mott," Sandy Mathieson said dismissively, "eighties comedian. Did you hear what happened?"

"No, what?" Louise said. The name sounded vaguely familiar.

"They ID'd the wrong person," Jessica said.

"You're kidding."

Sandy laughed. "Apparently he lived with this other guy, a writer, wasn't it?" He checked with Jessica (Christ, they were like a double-act), who nodded and took up the story. "And he was wearing his boyfriend's watch," she said.

"Who was?" Louise was totally confused.

"Richard Mott," Jessica said with theatrical patience, "was wearing the other guy's watch. His boyfriend. And the boyfriend-- get this--is a crime writer."

"Life imitating art," Sandy said as if he'd just invented the phrase. "Alex Blake. Ever heard of him?"

"No," Louise said. "They ID'd him by his watch?"

"Well, his face was gone, apparently," Jessica said in the offhand way you might say, "Do you want vinegar on your chips?" Louise could have eaten a horse, she'd had nothing since breakfast. "Have you got anything to eat?" she said to Jessica.

"Sorry, boss." Cheeky cow. Louise didn't believe her, you didn't get that fat without having constant access to food. Louise supposed she should have warm and fuzzy feelings toward the sisterhood, they were only 25 percent of the force, they should support one another, yada, yada, but quite honestly she'd like to corner Jessica and give her a few vicious playground pinches.

There was a constant undertow of communication on the po-lice radio. A lot of shoplifting. What would happen if Archie's foray into thieving hadn't been a one-off ? What would she do if he was caught next time? Louise checked her watch, he should be home from school by now.

Sandy turned to her and asked unexpectedly, parent to parent, "How's that lad of yours doing?"

"Fine," Louise said. "Archie's doing fine. Great," she added, trying to introduce a more upbeat note, "he's doing great." Sandy had a boy, but he was only six or seven years old, still harmless.

She climbed out of the car, waving her mobile at Sandy and Jessica in a shorthand that said only too plainly, "I'm going to make a call that I don't want you to hear." She wondered what they said about her when she wasn't there. She didn't really care as long as they thought she was good at her job.

She walked out onto the causeway, only one bar of signal on her phone. Jackson Brodie said he couldn't get a signal at all, that was why he hadn't phoned the police from the island.

She walked back and caught a signal. Her answering machine clicked in after a couple of rings, and she listened to an assertive male voice informing her that no one was available to answer the phone just now, so "leave a message." Nice and neutral, no "please" or "thank-you" (I'm a polite woman asking to be offended), no "sorry, there's no one at home" (open invitation to burglars), no promise that anyone would actually return the call. The male voice belonged to a friend's husband, drafted in to record the message after Louise had been plagued by nuisance calls, even though she was unlisted. Some guys just dialed every number until a woman answered. There were thousands of them out there, seeing out the wee small hours by dialing the Samari-tans and ChildLine and unsuspecting women. Wankers, in every sense of the word. She had an uncomfortable feeling that the per-petrator of the nuisance calls was Archie's friend Hamish.

"If you're there, Archie, can you pick up?" When hell froze over. Louise didn't know why she was bothering, he never an-swered the phone unless he thought it was one of his friends. She tried his mobile, but it went straight to his answering machine. If she could, she would have a tracking device implanted in his scruff.

Finally she gave in and, using the only lingua franca understood by fourteen-year-old boys, texted him, "Are u home? Eat something from the freezer. I may be late. Love Mum x." It was odd to give her-self that appellation, to commit it to writing, she never thought of herself as "Mum." Maybe that was where she'd gone wrong. Had she gone wrong? Probably.

Archie could just about manage to take a pizza or a burger from the freezer and put it in the microwave.There was no point in trying to get him to do anything more challenging ("An omelet, surely you can manage an omelet?").

Her phone rang, not Archie but Jim Tucker. "My girl died of a heroin overdose," he said without preamble. "No identity yet. The forensic dentist said her mouth was, and I quote, 'full of crap,' by which he meant foreign fillings, Eastern European, by the look of it."

"No dental records, then," Louise said.

"No, and I don't know if it's likely, but someone said that they thought Favors were cleaners."

"Cleaners?"

As soon as she'd said good-bye to Jim Tucker, her phone rang again. "I've been trying to phone you,"Archie complained.

"I try to phone you all the time and you never answer."

"Can Hamish stay over tonight?"

"It's a school night."

"We've got a geography project we have to do together."

"What project?"A short, muffled conversation ensued, Hamish tutoring Archie, no doubt, before he came back on the line and said smugly, "Discuss the transport factors influencing the location of industry."

It was plausible, Hamish was good. "Does his mother say he can?"

"Of course."

"Okay."

"And can we get a takeaway?"

"Okay. Do you have money?"

"Yes."

"Will you remember to feed the cat?"

"Whatever."

"That's not the answer I'm looking for."

"Yessss. Okay? Jesus."

Louise sighed, she really, really wanted a drink. A lime daiquiri. Cold enough to freeze her brain. And then she'd like to have a lot of sex. Casual, mindless, faceless, emotion-free sex. You would think casual sex would be easy, but no. She'd hardly had any since Archie hit adolescence. You couldn't just bring a guy home and shag him while your teenage son was playing Grand Theft Auto on the other side of a wafer-thin plasterboard wall. Every year there was a fresh surprise, something you didn't know about having a kid. Maybe it went on like that forever, maybe when Archie was sixty and Louise was in her eighties, she'd be thinking, "Well, I didn't realize sixty-year-old men did that."

She watched a uniformed PC tap on Jessica's window and hand her something.

“What did the UB want?" she asked, climbing back in the car.

"Brought this," Jessica said, handing her a copy of the Evening News, helpfully turned to an inside page where she pointed out the small headline POLICE ASK PUBLIC FOR HELP WITH THEIR INQUIRIES.

"It's not very obvious, is it?" Sandy said. "'Police are asking if any-one saw a woman go into the water'--'go into the water'? That's very vague."

"Well, it is very vague," Louise said. "She was found in the water and somehow or other she got into it."

"If she exists," Jessica said. She sneezed, and Sandy said, "Hope you're not getting the 'flu.' " Louise didn't care if Jessica got the "flu."

Louise felt suddenly incredibly tired. "Bugger this for a game of soldiers. They're putting out something on Radio Forth tomorrow, but in reality that's it for now. If there's a body out there, then it'll probably wash up eventually. I don't see what more we can do."

"I don't think there ever was a body," Jessica said. "I think Brodie made the whole thing up. I know where the nut is and it's not on the tree."

"I didn't like the guy," Sandy said with the certainty of one who thinks his own moral judgment is unimpeachable. "I'm all for calling it a day." He turned to Jessica and said, "Home, James."

Chapter 28

Jackson had a hellish vision of being stuck on one bus or an-other forever. This time it was one of the open-top tourist ones that lumber around British cities, holding up the traffic. Jackson had taken Marlee on the Cambridge one last year, thinking it would be an easy way of absorbing some (probably revisionist) his-tory, but now he couldn't remember a thing they had been told. It was cold on the upper deck, and a miserable wind seemed to have whipped itself across the North Sea with the sole intention of hitting Jackson on the back of the neck. This, Jackson reminded himself, was why he had moved to another country.

The Royal Mile was beginning to feel almost familiar to Jackson now, he felt like turning to the nearest person and pointing out St. Giles Church and the new Parliament Building (ten times overbudget--how could anything be ten times overbud-get?). The real tour guide was a melodramatically inclined middle-aged woman working for tips. It was the kind of job that a hard up Julia would take.

The bus trundled along Princes Street--no dark Gothicism here, only ugly high-street chain shops. It began to spit with rain, and less hardy foreign souls sought out the shelter of the lower deck, leaving only a scattering of Brits huddled under umbrellas and cagoules. He was half-listening to the tour guide telling them about witches (otherwise known as women, of course) being thrown alive into the Nor Loch, "which is now unrecognizable as our 'world-famous' Princes Street Gardens" (everything in Edinburgh was "world-famous," apparently--he wondered if that was true--famous in Somalia? in Bhutan?), when he noticed a pink van, a Citro?Combo, in the lane next to them. They were at a red traffic light, and when it changed to amber, the van moved off. Jackson wasn't thinking anything much at the time except for You don't see many pink vans, but a semiconscious part of his brain read the words emblazoned on the side panel of the van in black lettering--FAVORS--WE DO WHAT YOU WANT US TO DO!, and another semiconscious part of his brain dredged up the little pink card that had been in the dead girl's bra yesterday.

The two semiconscious parts of Jackson's brain finally commu-nicated with each other. This was a slower process than it used to be--Jackson imagined signal flags rather than high-speed broad-band. One day, he supposed, the different parts of his brain would find they were unable to interpret the messages. Flags waving helplessly in the wind. And that would be it. Senility.

Jackson sprinted down the stairs, past the huddled masses in steerage, and asked the driver to open the doors. The pink van was farther up Princes Street now, Jackson could have kept up with it at a jog, but sooner or later it was going to untangle itself from this traffic and then he would lose it. He dashed across the street in front of a hooting bus bearing down on him (buses had somehow become the bane of his life) and, at the taxi rank on Hanover Street, threw himself into the back of a black cab. "Where to?" the driver asked, and Jackson felt absurdly pleased with himself that he was able to say, "See that pink van? Follow it."

They weaved their way through the leafy pleasantness of subur-ban Edinburgh. ("Morningside," the cab driver said.) No mean streets these, Jackson thought. The black cab felt lumbering and ob-vious, hardly the ideal vehicle for covert activity. Still, the driver of the pink van didn't seem to notice, perhaps the black cab was so obvious that you couldn't see it. He supposed he should phone it in. He had Louise Monroe's card with her station number on it. The phone was answered by some kind of minion who said that "Inspector Monroe" was "out of the office" and did he want to leave a message? He didn't, thank you. He redialed the number (in his experience, a phone was hardly ever answered twice in a row by the same person) and had Louise Monroe's out-of-office status reiterated. He asked for her mobile number and was refused. If she had really wanted him to keep in touch, she should have given it to him, shouldn't she? No one could say he hadn't tried. It wasn't his fault if he had gone rogue, the renegade old lone wolf. Solving crimes.

The Combo drew to a halt, and Jackson said to the cab driver, "Keep on going, round the corner," where he paid and got out of the cab, and then walked nonchalantly back round the corner.

W E DO WHAT YOU WANT US TO DO! A Julia-like exclamation point. Jackson wondered if that was strictly true. Could they, for example, turn Looking for the Equator in Greenland into a good play? Heal the sick and make the lame walk? Find his dead woman in the Forth?

"It's a slogan," the mean-faced woman unloading buckets and mops from the van onto the pavement said. She had an embroi-dered badge on the pocket of her pink uniform that said HOUSE-KEEPER, an appellation that Jackson found vaguely menacing. The Mafia were supposed to call contract killers "cleaners," weren't they? (But probably only in the fiction he occasionally read.) What would that make a "Housekeeper"? A kind of ller?

"Favors," Jackson said pleasantly, "that's a nice name."

"It's a cleaning agency," the mean-faced woman said without looking at him.

"I wondered," Jackson said, "if you had the address for your office. I haven't been able to find it anywhere."

She looked at him suspiciously. "Why would you want it?"

"Oh, you know," Jackson said, "just to go in and have a chat, about getting the cleaners in." It sounded even more like Mob-speak when you put it like that.

"Everything is done on the phone," the Housekeeper said. She looked as if she breakfasted on lemons--"thrawn-faced," his father would have called her--but she had an accent as soft as Scotch mist.

"Everything on the phone?" Jackson asked. "How do you get new business?"

"Word of mouth. Personal recommendations."

A sallow young woman, built like a peasant and radiating hostility, came out of the nearest house and, without a word, picked up the buckets and mops and carried them inside.

"I'll be back to pick you up in two hours!" the Housekeeper shouted after her, and then she got into the van and drove off without giving Jackson a second look.

Jackson loped off in the opposite direction, trying to look insouciant in case the Housekeeper was watching him in her rearview mirror. When the pink van was out of sight, he doubled back and entered the house through the front door. He could hear the sounds of running water in the kitchen and someone clattering about upstairs. The noise of an aggressively wielded vacuum cleaner came from the back of the house, so Jackson reckoned there were at least three women in there. They might not all be women, of course. Don't make sexist assumptions, they always got you into trouble. With women, anyway.

He decided to target the one in the kitchen. Slow down, Jackson, he said to himself, you're not in a potential threat situation here. Armyspeak. The army felt so long ago now, yet it remained like a pattern in him. Sometimes he wondered what would have happened to him if his father had let him go down the pit instead of joining up. Every aspect of his life would have been different, he himself would have been a different man. He would be on the scrap heap now, of course, redundant, unwanted. But wasn't that what he was now?

In 1995, he remembered the year, remembered the moment, he had been at home in Cambridge, when his wife was still his wife, not an ex, and he was a policeman and she was hugely pregnant with Marlee (Jackson imagined their baby tightly packed like the heart of a cabbage inside his wife), and Jackson was washing up after dinner (when he still called it "tea," before his language was buffed into something more middle-class and southern by his wife). They ate early at the end of her pregnancy, any later and she said she was too full to sleep, so while he washed the pots he lis-tened to the Six O'clock News on Radio 4, and somewhere in the middle of that night's bulletin they announced the closure of the pit his father had worked in all his life. Jackson couldn't remember why that pit had made the news when so many had closed by then with so little fuss, perhaps because it had been one of the largest coalfields in the area, perhaps because it was the last working mine in the region, but whatever, he had stood with a soapy plate in his hand and listened to the newsreader, and without any warning the tears had started. He wasn't even sure why--for everything that had gone, he supposed. For the path he hadn't taken, for a world he'd never lived in. "Why are you crying?" Josie asked, lumbering into the kitchen, she could hardly get through the door by that stage. That was when she cared about every emo-tion he experienced. "Fucking Thatcher," he said, shrugging it off in a masculine way, making it political, not personal, although in this case there was no difference.

And then they got a baby and a dishwasher, and Jackson con-tinued on and didn't think again for a long time about the path he hadn't chosen, a way of life that had never been, yet that didn't stop him from aching for it in some confused place in his soul.

His target maid was at the sink too, wringing out a cloth and vig-orously wiping the draining board back and forth, back and forth. No crucifixion ears as far as he could see, although she had her back to him and was singing along to the radio in a foreign accent. There was so much background noise in the house that Jackson was unsure how to proceed without startling her. He was struck by three things: one--she wasn't the peasanty one that the Housekeeper had barked at, and two--she had a great behind, made greater by the tight skirt of the pink uniform. "Two hard-boiled eggs in a handkerchief," his brother used to say. His brother had been a connoisseur of women. One day, one day too soon, men would look at his daughter in the same way. And if he saw them looking at her like that, he would beat ten kinds of crap out of them.

Jackson had spent half his life in uniform without thinking much about it beyond that it made getting up in the morning eas-ier when you didn't have to make a choice about what to wear, so the effect a woman in uniform could have always struck him as curious. Not all uniforms, obviously, not Nazis, dinner ladies, traffic wardens. He tried to recall if he had ever seen Julia in a uni-form, offhand he couldn't really think of one that would suit her, she wasn't really a uniform kind of girl. Louise Monroe's black suit/white shirt combo was a kind of uniform. She had a little pulse that beat in her throat. It made her look more vulnerable than she probably was.

He never really got the third thought to the front of his brain because the woman in this particular uniform caught sight of him at that moment and reached into the dishwasher, plucked a big dinner plate from the rack, and in one smooth action sliced it through the air as if it were a Frisbee, aiming straight for his head. Jackson ducked and the plate crashed through the open kitchen doorway into the hall. He put his hands in the air before she reached for another plate. "You don't take any prisoners, do you?" he said.

"University discus champion," she said without any apparent remorse for having nearly decapitated him. "Why are you creeping?"

"I'm not creeping, I was looking for someone to clean my flat," Jackson said, trying to sound like a helpless male ("Shouldn't be too hard," he heard Josie's voice say in his head). "I saw the van and . . ."

"We're not called cleaners. We're called maids." She relented a little. "I'm sorry, I'm nervous." She sat down at the table and pushed her hands through her hair, her hands were red and raw with some kind of dermatitis. She said, "This morning, Sophia, a maid, a friend, found a man who was murdered in a house we go to. Was terrible," the foreign girl said mournfully.

"I'm sure it was," Jackson said.

"We're not paid enough for that."

Money. Always a good starting point, in Jackson's experience. He removed five twenty-pound notes from his wallet and placed them on the table. "What's your name?" he said to the girl.

"Marijut."

"Okay, Marijut," Jackson said, flicking the switch on the elec-tric kettle, "how about a nice cup of tea?"

“A young woman," Jackson repeated patiently, "I want to know if she's on your books."There was a listless air in the offices of Fa-vors. The girl in charge, who seemed to be the only person in the building, spoke a poor kind of English and seemed to want will-fully to misunderstand everything Jackson said to her. He automatically converted to a kind of simplistic pidgin because deep in his atavistic native soul he believed that foreigners couldn't be flu-ent in English, whereas, of course, it was the English who were incapable of speaking foreign languages. "Ears? Crosses?" he said loudly.

The office was in a neglected cobbled close off the Royal Mile.

The soot had long since been blasted off the face of Edinburgh, but the stonework in this place was still encrusted with the black reminder of the capital's reeking past. It was a cold, unloved place, strangely untouched by the hand of either the Enlightenment or the property developer.

Favors was squeezed in between a restaurant (a self-styled "bistro") and Fringe Venue 87. Jackson peered into the dim and meaty interior of the bistro, where the last few lunch customers still lingered. He made a mental note never to eat there. From the outside, the Fringe venue looked like a sauna, but it proved to be housing a disgruntled group of American high school children playing The Caucasian Chalk Circle to an audience of two men who looked as if they might have also mistaken the venue for a sauna. Julia had warned him about Edinburgh "saunas." "Don't for one minute imagine that they are actually saunas, Jackson."

The office had an unremarkable black-painted street door on whose jamb was fixed a cheap plastic nameplate that read FA-VORS--IMPORT AND EXPORT. No exclamatory promise to fulfill his desires, he noticed. "Import" and "export"--if ever there were two words that covered a multitude of sins, these were they. There was a security camera above the buzzer so that it was impossible to stand at the door without being scrutinized. He put on his most trustworthy face and got in by posing as a courier. No one ever seemed to ask couriers for their IDs.

He had to go up a stair and along a corridor that was stacked with industrial-size containers of cleaning fluids. HAZARDOUS MA-TERIALS, one of them said. Another sported a black skull and crossbones, but the writing on the container was in a language that Jackson didn't recognize. He thought about Marijut, wringing the cloth out, cleaning the draining board with her washerwoman hands. If nothing else, he could report Favors to Environmental Health. Another wall of boxes was stenciled with one mysterious word: MATRYOSHKA.

Perhaps Favors was some kind of crime cartel that was running everything in the city. And what was it with the crucifixes? A Vatican-run crime cartel?

"This woman had crucifixes in her ears," Jackson said to the receptionist. "Crosses." He took a pen from her desk and drew a crucifix on a pad of paper and pointed at his ears. "Earrings," he said, like yours, he pointed toward the silver hoops in the recep-tionist's ears. She looked at him as if he were mad. Marijut had told him that she didn't recall seeing any girl with crucifix earrings. His description, "Five six, hundred twenty pounds, blond hair," could easily have fitted half the girls she knew. "Me, for ex-ample," she said. Or the receptionist.

Jackson tapped the computer monitor and said, "Let's look in here."The girl gave him a surly glare and then scrolled idly down the screen.

"What do you want her for?" the girl asked.

"I don't want her for anything. I want to know if she's on your books." Jackson craned his neck to catch a glimpse of the screen. The girl opened a file that looked like a CV, there was a thumb-nail photograph in the top left-hand corner, but she closed it down immediately. "Stop," he said. "Go back, go back to that last one." It was her, he could swear it was her. His dead girl.

"She doesn't work for us anymore," the receptionist said. She gave a little hiccup of laughter as if she were making a joke. "Her contract is terminated." She clicked the files shut with an air of fi-nality and turned off the screen.

"This woman I'm looking for," he enunciated each word slowly and clearly, "this woman is dead." Jackson made a slashing move-ment across his throat. The girl shrank away from him. He wasn't very good at miming. He could have done with Julia's help, no one played charades with as much enthusiasm as Julia, except per-haps for Marlee. How did you portray dead? He crossed his arms over his chest and closed his eyes. When he opened them, the Housekeeper was standing in front of him, regarding him quizzi

cally. "He says he's courier," the girl at the computer said sarcastically. "Does he?" the Housekeeper said. "I'm looking for someone," Jackson said stoutly, "a girl who's

gone missing." "What's her name?" the Housekeeper asked. "I don't know." "You're looking for someone and you don't know who she is?" "I can give you someone else," the girl at the computer screen

offered. "I don't want someone else," Jackson said. "What kind of agency are you?"

The girl leaned closer to him over the desk and, giving Jackson a predatory kind of smile, said, "What kind of agency would you like us to be?"

Chapter 29

"No room at the inn," the policewoman assigned to look after Martin said. They were sitting in a car outside the police mortuary, waiting while a civilian on the radio back at head-quarters tried to find him somewhere to stay for the night. He couldn't sleep among the aftermath of the carnage in his "active-crime-scene" house, wouldn't have wanted to if he could. "You don't have any friends you could stay the night with?" the police-woman asked. No, he didn't. She gave him a sympathetic look. There was his brother in the Borders, of course, but there was little in the way of sanctuary to be had in his household, and he doubted he would be welcome there, anyway.

"Clare" ("PC Clare Deponio") looked like one of the police-women who had come to Paul Bradley's aid yesterday, but they all looked alike in their uniforms. The police car was parked almost exactly where the Honda and the Peugeot had faced off against each other yesterday. Who would have thought that event would have faded into such insignificance?

"The Festival," Clare said, coming off the radio, "no hotel rooms anywhere, apparently."

Superintendent Campbell had handed Martin over to someone only slightly more menial ("Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutherland"). Sutherland took ("accompanied") Martin from his own house to a police station, where Martin had his fingerprints taken--it was exactly like the Society of Authors' tour--the inspector said it was "for comparison," but after that it stopped being like the Society of Authors' tour because they gave him a white paper boilersuit to wear and took all his clothes away while they put him in an interview room and questioned him for a long time about his relationship with Richard Mott and his whereabouts at the time of Richard's death. Martin felt like a convict. He was given tea and biscuits--Rich Tea, to denote his change in status. Pink wafers and chocolate bourbons for the innocent members of the Society of Authors, plain Rich Tea for people who spent drugged nights in dodgy hotel rooms with men. ("So you and Mr. Bradley slept together? In the same bed?") He still hadn't mentioned the gun. Inspector Sutherland enjoyed pretending to be baffled. "I'm having trouble getting my head round this, Mr. Canning-- you saved a stranger's life, you spent the night with him, but he disappeared before dawn. Meanwhile, in your own house, your friend was being bludgeoned to death."

Paul Bradley had an address in London, Martin remembered the nurse in A and E copying it down, the same address that he had watched him write in the hotel register.

"The Met are looking into it for us," Sutherland said. Sutherland reminded Martin of someone, but he couldn't think who. He had this unsettling way of smiling at inappropriate mo-ments so that Martin, who tended to smile when he was smiled at, found himself responding with an inane grin to statements such as, "Mr. Mott's skull was shattered by a blunt instrument."

A female detective sergeant sat next to Sutherland. She was silent throughout, like a mute. There was a mirror on the wall, and Martin wondered if it was two-way. He couldn't think why else you would have a mirror in an interview room. Was someone in the looking-glass world watching him dunk his convict-grade biscuit into his tea?

"He did exist," Martin said.

"No one's doubting his existence, Mr. Canning," Sutherland said, like a pedantic philosopher. Martin missed Superintendent Camp-bell's amiable "Martin," as if they were old acquaintances. "He was involved in a road-rage incident," Sutherland continued. He smiled and paused rather pointedly before saying, "The same one you claim you yourself were."

"I was," Martin said. "I made a statement."

"The incident was logged just after midday yesterday. The vic-tim--your Paul Bradley--was treated at the Royal Infirmary for a minor head injury, he signed the register of the Four Clans. Hun-dreds of people saw him during the course of yesterday, his exis-tence is not in doubt. The problem is--" Another well-timed pause for a smile. It stretched the edges of his face, the Cheshire Cat would have struggled in a contest with Chief Inspector Sutherland. "The problem, Mr. Canning, is that no one remembers you."

"The police took a statement from me at the hospital."

"But after that?"

"I was with Paul Bradley."

There was a knock on the door, and a constable came in and put a piece of paper on the desk in front of the silent sergeant. She read what was on the paper, her sphinxlike features revealing nothing, and then passed the paper over to Sutherland.

"The mysterious Mr. Bradley," Sutherland murmured.

"He's real," Martin protested. "His name's in the hotel register."

"Yours isn't, though, is it?" He waved the piece of paper at Martin. "We asked the Met to check the address that Paul Bradley gave, and it turns out it's a row of lockups. The mysterious Mr. Bradley doesn't seem to exist after all."

The previously silent female detective leaned forward suddenly and said to Martin, earnestly, as if she wanted to help him, as if she were a therapist or a counselor, "Were you and Richard Mott lovers, Martin? Did you have a tiff?"

"A tiff?"

"An argument that got out of hand, escalated into violence? Was he jealous that you had gone to a hotel with another man?"

"It wasn't like that. It was nothing like that!" He removed his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. He wished people would stop asking him questions.

"Or, let me run this by you," Inspector Sutherland suggested amiably, "you were involved in a gay lovers' threesome that went horribly wrong."

Richard Mott's parents had traveled up from Milton Keynes to identify their son. Richard had a whole repertoire of jokes in his routine about his parents, about their politics, their religion, their bad taste. None of the things he said about them onstage seemed pertinent to the heartbroken, bewildered couple grieving in the police mortuary. The identity of the corpse had become a vexed issue for the police. Reluctant to expose the Motts to the full horror of what had happened to their son, they had muddled matters more by showing them the flatlined Rolex that Richard had taken from Martin. They had cried with relief because it "definitely wasn't Richard's."

They showed the watch to Martin, and he said yes, it belonged to him (there was a crack across the glass, he tried to imagine how that might have happened), and Mr. Mott shouted, "There you are, you see!" pointing at Martin as if this were proof that he was the dead man rather than their son. Richard Mott seemed to have appropriated everything that belonged to Martin, including his identity.

"We could wait for dental records," Sutherland murmured to Martin, "but that would take some time, and the whole thing has become so... confused." Martin knew he was being asked to step up and didn't really see how he could not. Be a man. Do as you would unto others. The meek shall inherit the earth. He wanted Sutherland to think well of him, so after a considerable briefing--"You have to prepare yourself for a shock" and "The injuries are very unpleasant"--he was taken into the small room that smelled not only of antiseptic but also of something sweet and unpleasant, and there, beneath a white sheet, were the battered remains of Richard Mott. Neither better nor worse than he had imagined. Simply different, and in some way artificial, as if Richard Mott had been made up for a film. Martin thought of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video, but it was definitely Richard. There was no doubt at all about that. Martin waited to be over-come by the horror of it, wondered if he would faint or vomit, but none of these things happened, he just found himself feeling grateful that it was Richard Mott lying there and not himself. Worse things had, after all, happened to him than viewing Richard Mott's corpse.

"There but for fortune," Sutherland said.

"I don't understand," Martin puzzled, "who identified me as Richard Mott? Who identified Richard Mott as me?" It depended on which way you looked at it, he supposed.

"I believe it was your brother, Mr. Canning," Sutherland said.

"My brother?" His own brother had identified him wrongly? Somehow that said everything about what was wrong with their relationship.

Sutherland tapped his wrist, Martin wondered if it was a Ma-sonic gesture of some kind, but he said, "The watch, we showed him your watch, Martin. It was an informal ID, we would have got to the truth eventually."

"I'd better phone him," Martin said.

"Probably."

It had proved to be an odd kind of conversation ("I'm not dead, Chris, the police made a mistake") that hadn't gone well. Christopher was still driving home. "I'm just passing Haddington," he said as if his geographical location were relevant. "Wait a minute, I'm not on the hands-free." This was followed by the noise of fum-bling, a curse that seemed to indicate the phone had been dropped, scrabbling, and, finally, "Wouldn't want to get pulled over by a fucking policeman." Martin wondered if Sutherland, sitting across a desk from him, heard this slur.

Christopher proceeded to run through a range of emotions-- disbelief, shock, disappointment, and finally an irritable "For fuck's sake, Martin," as if Martin had committed some kind of de-ranged prank. Martin supposed his brother had spent the previous couple of hours of bereavement getting used to the idea of being in possession of Martin's copyright for the next seventy years, to say nothing of the Merchiston house.

Thank goodness they hadn't phoned his mother down in East-bourne. He tried to imagine how his mother would have responded to the news of his death. He expected she would have been underwhelmed.

The anonymous civilian came back on the phone, and Clare rolled her eyes at the news that they were still having trouble finding him a room for the night.

"You would think," she said, a sentence that apparently didn't need completing. Martin sighed and said, "I think I know a place that will have vacancies."

“It's all been a bit of a cock-up, hasn't it?" Clare said cheerfully to Martin. "It made the papers, you know.Your death."

"My death," Martin echoed. His death had been pronounced. A murder is announced. It was like a witch doctor laying a curse on him, dooming him to invisibility or death. Isn't that what happened? The witch doctor told you that you were going to die, so you did, by the power of suggestion rather than any actual ability on his part to hex, but the means were moot when the result was certain.

Martin asked Clare to stop at a newsagent on George Street, one good thing about being in a police car, perhaps the only good thing, was the fact that they could stop anywhere they wanted. LOCAL WRITER MURDERED, he read out to her from the Evening News as he climbed back into the car. "The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated," he added.

"Well, yes," she said, puzzled, "because you're not actually dead, are you?"

"No, I'm not," he agreed. There was a photograph beneath the headline, it looked like some kind of poor-quality holiday snap that Martin couldn't recollect ever seeing before, and he wondered where on earth they had got it from.

The traffic forced them to a halt outside the Assembly Rooms, where a poster announcing a gala benefit for Amnesty still displayed Richard Mott's name, in smallish print near the bottom of the bill.

Clare took the opportunity to scan the newspaper. "You're quite famous," she said, sounding surprised. "Alex Blake, whose real name was Martin Canning, trained for the priesthood before becoming a religious studies teacher," Clare continued, ". . . turned his hand to writing late in life."

"I was never a priest," Martin said, "that's disinformation. And forty-two," Martin said, "I hardly think that's late in life, do you?"

She said nothing, merely smiled in that sympathetic way again. He wondered how old she was, she looked about twelve.

He opened a packet of Minstrels he'd bought in the newsagent and tipped some into her palm. "What kind of books do you write, then?" she asked.

"Novels."

"What kind of novels?"

"Crime novels," Martin said.

"Really? That's ironic, isn't it? Fiction stranger than truth and all that."They set off again, plowing through the clotted traffic as far as the next zebra crossing, where a seemingly endless line of peo-ple trailed in front of them. "They go slow on purpose," Clare said, "gives them a false sense of power, but at the end of the day, they're on foot and I'm in a car."

"The author of seven novels based on private detective Nina Riley," she continued to read relentlessly. "It's good you have a woman heroine," she said. "Is she a real kick-ass?"

Martin pondered the question, he liked the idea of Nina Riley being kick-ass, it elevated her out of the tweed-and-pearls postwar world into something more dynamic. She knew how to fly a plane and climb mountains, she had driven a racing car, she could fence, although the opportunities for swordplay were few and far between, even in the forties. "The blighter's getting away, Bertie. I need a weapon--throw me that hockey stick!"

"Well, in her own way, yes, I suppose she is."

"So do you make a living from it?" Clare asked.

"Yes. Better than most people. I'm lucky. Do you read much?" he added, in an attempt to steer the conversation away from him-self.

"No time." She laughed. Martin couldn't imagine a world where there was no time to read.

"His agent, Melanie Lenehan"--wow, there's a tongue twister-- "was quoted as saying,'This is a tragedy in every sense of the word.Martin was just beginning to enjoy the fruits of his phenomenal success. He was writing at the top of his game.'" Martin felt a pang of disappointment that Melanie had not bothered to come up with any-thing better than banal platitudes. Or perhaps that's what she believed he merited.

Clare accompanied him into the Four Clans and rang the brass bell on the counter. The thing about the police, Martin was beginning to notice, was that they behaved like people who didn't need to ask permission, because, of course, they didn't. Paul Bradley had possessed the same authority, it was something natu-ral and unstrained. These people didn't spend their lives being apologetic.

A woman appeared reluctantly from the room at the back of the reception. She wiped a crumb from the corner of her mouth and gave them both an unfriendly stare. She had a bulky figure, and her ill-fitting gray suit and severe hairstyle, not to mention her de-meanor, reminded Martin of a prison governor. (Or rather his idea of a prison governor, never having met one in real life. Not yet, anyway.) She was wearing a badge that said MAUREEN, but she looked too formidable to be addressed with such intimacy. He caught a glimpse of a table in the back room, on which was a well-thumbed copy of the Evening News and a plate containing a half-eaten toasted sandwich. Even from where he was standing, Martin could see the blaring headline LOCAL WRITER MURDERED and make out his own grainy features in the photograph.

"Maureen" checked him in, unfazed by the fact that he was accompanied by a police officer. No mention was made of how he was going to pay the bill. He was handed the key to his room as if he were a prisoner who was allowed to lock himself into his own cell.

"Right, I'll be off now, then," Clare said. "Good luck, with the writing and ...everything."

On his weary way up the stairs, Martin caught the eye of the stag. It regarded him mutely, an expression of moody indifference on its moldy features.

Chapter 30

"Murdered, Jackson!" Julia said, her face a pantomime of round-eyed horror, but she couldn't keep the excitement out of her voice.

"Murdered?" Jackson echoed.

"I was eating lunch with Richard Mott yesterday, and today he's dead. Caught the umpire's eye and Bob's your uncle--gone." She pronounced "gone" as "gawn" in a Dick Van Dyke kind of cockney. She seemed positively euphoric compared with this morning. "The police have been round interviewing everyone. Murdered, Jackson," she said again, relishing the word. They were standing at the door of the sweatbox that passed for a female dressing room in Julia's venue, into which actresses from another play were also crammed, most of them in their underwear. Jackson tried not to look. He felt as if he were backstage at a strip show, albeit a rather highbrow one, where people said, "I can't believe it, he was in my light the whole show yesterday." Julia herself had changed out of her sackcloth-and-ashes costume but was still dithering, unwilling to leave the world of performance behind. Of course, for Julia every day was a performance in one way or an-other.

"You said you had a drink with him," Jackson said. "You didn't say you ate."

"Does it matter?" Julia frowned.

"Well, not now," Jackson said.

"What do you mean, 'not now'? Would it have mattered if he was still alive?" Julia's husky voice rose to a more theatrical pitch. She could have played to the whole of the Albert Hall without amplification if she'd wanted to. "I had a cheese roll, he had pasta, it was hardly cunnilingus."

The underwear-clad actresses all turned to stare at them. "Please," Jackson hissed. When had everything between them become so jagged? Had Richard Mott paid for lunch? No such thing as a free lunch, except for the biggest fish.

"And how are you feeling, Julia?" Julia said. "How did your preview go?"

"Sorry," Jackson said. "How did your preview go?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Another preview? Tonight?" Jackson said.

"Well, God knows we need one," Julia said, drawing hard on a cigarette and then breaking out into a fit of filthy coughing. They were standing in the street outside the venue. Just over twenty-four hours ago Jackson had witnessed Honda Man trying to kill Peugeot Guy on this very spot.

"I told you this morning," Julia said vaguely when her scarred lungs had recovered from the coughing bout.

"I didn't see you this morning," Jackson said.

"You don't listen," Julia said. What a strangely wifely thing for her to say.

"I didn't not listen," Jackson said. "I didn't see you."

"That's okay, isn't it?" Julia said, ignoring him. "You don't have plans?"

He sighed. "No, I don't have plans. What about now? We could have a drink. Afternoon tea?" Surely she would respond to those two words.

"It's much too late for afternoon tea," Julia said crossly. Her left eyelid twitched, and she took another long, desperate drag on her cigarette. "And Tobias is about to give us notes."

"You always have notes," Jackson grumbled.

"Well, thank goodness for that," Julia snapped, "because we cer-tainly need as much help as we can get." She ground out the cig-arette beneath the sole of her boot. She was wearing black lace-up boots with a high heel that made Jackson have unchaste thoughts about Victorian governesses.

"I'm sorry," she said, suddenly contrite, pressing herself against him. He felt her body slacken, as if her strings had just been cut, and he rested his chin on the top of her head. She was taller than usual because of the boots. They both kept their arms by their sides, just leaning against each other like two unbalanced people trying to hold each other up. He smelled her perfume, something spicy like cinnamon that she hadn't worn before. He noticed for the first time that her earrings were tiny porcelain pansies. He did-n't think he'd seen them before, either. Her hair was mad as usual, you really could imagine birds nesting in it, he wouldn't have been surprised if one evening a flock of rooks returned to roost there. ("Wouldn't that be wonderful?" Julia said.) A chopstick that, in a victory of creativity over physics, seemed to be holding the whole edifice in place nearly poked Jackson's eye out.

There was a poster on the wall behind them for Looking for the Equator in Greenland. It showed Julia reaching out to the audience in a manner that Julia said was supposed to be beseeching but to Jackson looked whimsical. The faces of the other cast members were stacked in a kind of pyramid around her, in a way that was, unfortunately, reminiscent of Queen in the video for "Bohemian Rhapsody." It was pasted next to one for Richard Mott's COMIC VIAGRA FOR THE MIND. Someone had taken a felt-tip pen and scrawled "Canceled" across his face.

She stepped away from him and said, "The preview should be finished about nine, although we ran over this afternoon. We'll probably go for something to eat, then for a drink. Come and join us, help us lick our wounds." He wished she was in a good play, one the critics would rave about, one that ended up transferring to the West End.

He had a sudden, horrible thought. "Your sister's not coming up for your first night, is she?"

"Amelia?"

It was odd the way she said that, as if there were a choice of sis-ters, as if Olivia and Sylvia were still alive. Maybe they were still alive for Julia.

"Yes, Amelia."

"No. I told her to come later, when the play's run in a bit. She won't like it anyway, it's not her kind of thing. She likes Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov. I thought she could come up and stay for a few days. That would be nice, wouldn't it?"

"Hold me back."

"Don't be like that, Jackson. Amelia's all I've got."

Jackson refrained from saying the obvious "You've got me" in case it provoked more arguments.

"Oh, I nearly forgot," Julia said, suddenly animated (when had her moods started changing so quickly?). She reached into her big carpetbag, pulling out an assortment of God knows what before finding what she was looking for. "Free tickets!" she said with an enforced gaiety. When Jackson made no attempt to take them, she pushed them into his hand.

"Who did you have lunch with to get those?" he asked. Why couldn't he keep his mouth shut? He'd meant it to come out as a joke (not a good one, admittedly), but it ended up sounding offensive. Julia just laughed, though, and said, "Oh, sweetie, I had to fuck two clowns and an elephant to get those tickets. The circus, Jackson, they're tickets for the circus, they were handing them out for free, drumming up trade, the circus wallah chappie gave them to me. It'll be good sport. Go. Relive the childhood you never had."

"A lime daiquiri and a Glenfiddich, please," Jackson said to the barman. It was a nice old-fashioned pub, no music or game ma-chines, lots of polished wood and stained glass. He wasn't a whiskey drinker by nature, yet he seemed to have drunk a lot of the stuff since arriving. It must have been in his Scottish blood all this time, calling to him.

"And yet you've never visited Scotland before?" Louise Mon-roe said. "That's odd, don't you think? Do you think you're avoiding something? Psychologically speaking." No small talk then, Jackson thought, none of that getting-to-know-you stuff, pussy-footing around each other's past. "I was in France on holiday.""Oh? What part?" or "You like country music? What a coincidence, so do I." Cutting straight to the chase instead--"Are you psychologically damaged? Are you in avoidance about something?"

"I don't know," Jackson said. "Are you? Avoiding something?"

"Question with a question," she said as if he'd just failed a test. "The psychopathology of it is interesting, though, isn't it?" "That's a big word," Jackson said. "Pretty and smart, huh?" "You may behave like an idiot, but you're not stupid." Jackson wondered if that was supposed to be a compliment. "Anyway, cheers," she said, taking a healthy swig of her lime

daiquiri.

"Confusion to kings and tyrants," Jackson responded, raising his glass. He was under the impression that a daiquiri was the kind of drink you were supposed to sip. He avoided cocktails in case they arrived encumbered with parasols and sickly sweet cherries on sticks, but the daiquiri looked clean and inviting.

"Try it," she said, holding the glass out to him, and he felt shocked by the sudden intimacy of the offer. He had been brought up in a parsimonious household where they tended to steal food off one an-other's plates, not offer it up willingly. He could still see his brother, Francis, winking at him while he filched a sausage off his sister--and getting a box on the ear from Niamh for his efforts. Julia, on the other hand, would share with a dog, she was forever pushing forks and spoons into his mouth, "Try this, eat this," licking her lips, sucking her fingers, he'd never met anyone before for whom the line between food and sex was so thin. The things she could do with a strawberry were enough to make a grown man blush. He had a sudden image of her in the Nell Gwyn costume, volunteering her breasts to the photographer, oranges are the only fruit. He had seen that on television, Julia had read the book, that was the difference between them. She had a little gap between her front teeth that gave her the slightest of lisps. It was funny--he'd always been aware of that, yet he'd never really thought about it before.

"No, you're all right," he said to Louise Monroe, lifting his glass to prove that he was happy with his own choice of alcohol, and she said, "I wasn't offering to share DNA with you."

"I didn't think you were."

The pub was on a street off the Royal Mile, close to the offices of Favors.

"I see you found the soot-blackened, whiskey-soaked, blood-sodden metaphysical core of the wen that was Edinburgh," she said when she met him in the cobbled close.

"Right," he said. She could be quite wordy once she got going. Like Julia. He had finally managed to get a call through to her, and all she could say was, "You should have phoned me before you came here. Oh, no, wait a minute, you're not a policeman, are you? You shouldn't have been here in the first place."

"I couldn't get ahold of you, you didn't give me your mobile number."

"Well, I'm here now, and what exactly am I looking for? I see a very dodgy-looking sauna and a doomed production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle."

"Shit,"Jackson said, staring at the entrance. There was no longer any sign saying FAVORS--IMPORT AND EXPORT, no sign saying anything at all. No buzzer, no camera. The door was still there, Jackson was relieved to see, so he hadn't entered some parallel uni-verse, and when Louise Monroe gave it a push, it opened with the theatrical kind of creak that a sound-effects man would have been proud of. They made their way up the stairs, if they had been Americans they would have had their guns out by now, Jackson thought, but as it was, being Scottish and half-Scottish, they had nothing to defend themselves with but their wits.

"First floor," Jackson whispered.

"Why are you whispering?" Louise asked in a loud voice that echoed in the stairwell. "I thought you said they were a cleaning agency."

"They are," he said. "Sort of."

"Sort of?"

"No, they are, definitely," Jackson said, "I mean I've seen them cleaning--scrubbing, hoovering, that sort of thing. They wear pink uniforms." He had an image of Marijut's buttocks moving rhythmically and immediately dismissed it. "It's just there's something . . . odd about them. I don't know. A lot of industrial-cleaning firms take on ex-cons, you know, maybe there's a link. The girls I saw on Morningside were definitely legit cleaners. I thought I saw the dead girl's photograph on their database."

The place was abandoned, no computer, no filing cabinet or desk, the Housekeeper and the receptionist had packed up and gone. The place felt as if it had never been occupied in the first place, the cheap contract carpeting, slightly tacky underfoot, the chipped paintwork and the unwashed windows, all bore no hint that a couple of hours previously there had been a business here. There was a smell of something stale and slightly rank.

"What database would that be, then?" Louise Monroe mur-mured, looking around the empty space. "The one on that invis-ible computer over there?"

"I don't understand," Jackson muttered. He spotted something on the carpet, a tiny painted wooden doll, no bigger than a peanut. He picked it up and peered at it, and Louise Monroe said, "You need spectacles, you shouldn't be so vain."

Jackson ignored the comment. "What is that?" he asked, holding the little doll up for her inspection.

"It's from one of those Russian doll sets," she said, "the ones that nest inside one another. Matri-something."

"Matryoshka?"

"Yes."

"This one doesn't open," Jackson said.

"That's because it's the last one. The baby."

Jackson pocketed the doll. It was less than two hours since he was here, how could they have just packed up their tents and slipped away without leaving a trace behind? No, they had left something--he spotted something on a windowsill. A pink card. FAVORS--WE DO WHAT YOU WANT US TO DO! He pounced on it and held it up for Louise Monroe's inspection. "See," he said triumphantly. "I didn't make it up."

"I know," she said, producing an identical card from her pocket. "Snap."

"Where did you get that?"

"From the body of a dead prostitute."

"Dead? As in 'murdered' dead?"

"No, she OD'd. No foul play, apart from drug trafficking, prostitution, economic exploitation, illegal immigration, of course. It's not my case," she said with a shrug, as if she didn't care. Jackson was pretty sure that wasn't so.

"Two dead girls turning up within twenty-four hours of each other," Jackson said, "both with these cards on their bodies? What does that say to you?"

"The cards are the only thing that links them."

"But that's enough," Jackson persisted. "I'll bet you the cleaning agency's a front, maybe it's a way of getting girls into the coun-try, maybe they pick out the more vulnerable ones, take their pass-ports, threaten people they've left behind. You know the kind of stuff that goes on, for Christ's sake. There's a connection between the two girls, there has to be. It leads back to this place."

"Could just be a coincidence."

"You're playing devil's advocate. And I don't believe in coinci-dence," Jackson said. "A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen."

"So much wisdom from one so foolish, and I would just like to remind you once again that you are not a policeman and this is not your case."

"No, it's your case." Frustration was beginning to get the better of him. He wished he'd slapped a pair of handcuffs on the "Housekeeper" and secured her to the nearest heavy object. Or if he could have only anchored his dead girl to a buoy or clamped the pink van this afternoon, taken Marijut into custody, anything that would have provided immovable evidence rather than this shifting mirage. He felt as if he were trying to hold on to water. "If you believed me it would help," he said, sounding more pa-thetic than he'd intended.

He thought she might get stroppy with him (yet again), but she walked over to one of the filthy windows and gazed out at the view--a stone wall opposite. Then she sighed and said, "Well, the sun's over the yardarm and I'm off the clock. And I want a drink."

"You like country music?" Louise Monroe said doubtfully. "Good-hearted women and bad-living men and all that stuff?"

"Well, it's not all like that."

"And you live in France?"This was more like an interrogation than a conversation. He thought he preferred it when she was casting doubts on his "psychopathology" and calling him an idiot.

"I've never been to France," Louise said.

"Not even Paris?"

"No, not even Paris."

"Not even Disneyland?"

"Christ, I haven't been to France. Okay?"

"Okay. Do you want another one?" he asked.

"No thanks, I'm driving. I shouldn't be drinking at all."

"And yet you are." Their conversation had been restricted to an almost masculine neutrality, although Jackson admitted to a di-vorce and she shrugged and said, "Never married, never saw the point." He had learned that she liked Saabs, she had fast-tracked to inspector, "climbing over the bodies on the way up," she wore contacts ("You should try them"). But then she suddenly said, "Do you have someone?" and he said, "Julia. She's an actress." He could hear himself sounding apologetic, as if an actress were something to be embarrassed by (which it frequently was). If Louise hadn't asked, would Jackson have owned up to Julia? The sad male answer was no. "She's in a play at the Festival."

"What's Julia like?"

"She's an actress."

"You said that already."

"I know, but it does kind of explain her. I don't know, she's short, she's an optimist. Usually," he added.

"You described a dead body to me better than that," Louise said.

"Julia's hard to explain," he said, gazing at the dregs of his whiskey as if they held the key. Julia was impossible to describe, you had to know her to understand her. "She's like . . . herself."

"Well, that's a good thing, isn't it?" Louise said.

"Yes, I suppose it is,"he said. And yet it didn't feel like that. That was the trouble, of course. You started off liking someone because of who she was and you ended up wanting her to be different.

He liked Louise because she was bolshie and cynical and sure of her-self, but give them a few months and those would be the things that would drive him crazy. Give them a few months--what was he thinking?

"Well, thanks for the drink," Louise Monroe said abruptly, standing up and putting on her jacket. "I should go."

He would have offered to help her with the jacket, but he didn't know if she would like that. He did hold the door open for her, though. His mother had instilled manners into him, mostly by cuffing him about the head. "Always hold open a door, always offer your seat. No gentleman would let a lady walk on the outside of the pavement." She had been brought up in a backward part of Ireland where they didn't even have pavements, but she didn't want her sons to grow up like their father. He'd never really understood about the outside of the pavement. ("So you can die first if a horse and carriage swerves out of control, of course," Julia explained.)

He walked up the high street with Louise, the farther up the street they got, the more revelers they encountered, plus all the usual sus-pects--fire-eaters, jugglers, unicyclists, or any combination of the three. A guy on a unicycle juggling with flaming torches, really pushing the envelope. There was a woman pretending to be some kind of living statue of Marie Antoinette. Was that really a suitable job for a woman? For anyone, come to that? How would he feel if Marlee grew up and announced she wanted to do that for a living?

"Oh, I don't know," Louise Monroe said, "doing absolutely nothing all day, I could do with some of that."

"It's not all it's cracked up to be, trust me."

They hesitated awkwardly on the pavement at a crossroad for a few seconds as if they were both unsure of the correct form of farewell address. For a delusional second Jackson thought she was going to kiss him on the cheek, one half of him hoped she would, the other half was terrified she would, good and bad Jacksons having a little tussle. But she just said, "Right. I'll let you know if anything turns up."

"Anything?"

"Your girl."

"His" dead girl, he ruminated. She was his girl, for better or worse, no one else wanted to own her or claim her or even acknowledge her existence.

"Well, good night," she said.

"I don't suppose you want to go to the circus, do you?"

Chapter 31

Martin was in a different room at the Four Clans. He was lying on the bed, trying to have a nap. His body was exhausted, but his brain had apparently discovered a secret amphetamine factory and was popping pills at will. The picture on the wall oppo-site his bed was a print of Burke and Hare caught in the act of gleefully digging up a dead body, almost, but not quite, trumping the flaming witch of the previous room. He sat up and twisted round in order to see what was hanging above the bed. The Battle of Flodden Field, the slaughter of the Scots in full swing. Twenty-four hours ago he didn't even know that the Four Clans existed, now his entire life seemed contained within its tartan walls. He was being brainwashed by plaid.

He turned the television on and caught an evening Scottish news bulletin. "The comic Richard Mott... battered to death... home of crime writer Alex Blake . . . earlier in an extraordinary mix-up . . . reclusive writer Alex Blake, whose real name was . . . a spokesman for Lothian and Borders Police said that they are appealing for witnesses to the murder... the Merchiston area of Edinburgh." He turned the television off.

He didn't have any books with him, nor his laptop, of course, so he could neither read nor write. Martin hadn't realized how much of his life was taken up by these two activities. How would he manage if he became blind or deaf ? Or both? At least if he was blind he could get a guide dog--there was an upside to every-thing, a silver lining of helpful Labs and noble German shepherds eager to be his eyes. They had dogs for the deaf too, but Martin wasn't sure what they did. Tugged at your sleeve a lot, probably, while looking meaningfully at things.

His phone chirruped, and he listened to the rich Dublin tones of his agent. "Are you dead, Martin," she asked, "or not dead? Only I wish you'd make up your mind, because I'm fielding a lot of questions here."

"Not dead," Martin said. "It said on the television news that I'm a recluse. Why would they say that? I'm not reclusive, I'm not a recluse."

"Well, you don't have a lot of friends, Martin." Melanie dropped her voice as if there were other people in the room with her and said, "Did you kill him, Martin? Did you kill Richard Mott? I know we always say that no publicity is bad publicity, but murder's a line you can't really cross. You know what I'm saying?"

"Why on earth would I kill Richard Mott? What would make you think that?"

"Where were you when he died?" Melanie asked.

"In a hotel," Martin said.

"With a woman?" she said, sounding surprised.

"No, with a man."Whichever way he said it, it wasn't going to sound right. He couldn't imagine what she would say if he told her about the gun. The gun had become a guilty secret he was carrying around with him. He should have just told the police, brazened out their incredulity, but spending the night with an armed assassin didn't seem like a very good alibi.

"Jesus," Melanie said. "Do you have a lawyer, Martin?" She let pass what she obviously thought was a decent interval and then said, "How's the book going, anyway?"

Did she honestly think he was writing while all this was going on? Someone, someone he knew, had been murdered in his house. There were lumps of brain matter on his coffee table.

"An antidote," she said, "art can be an antidote to life."

Nina Riley was hardly art. "This is pretty spiffing, Bertie, we should think about taking a cruise more often. Now all we have to do is prove that our cat burglar is Maud Elphinstone and that the name on her birth certifi-cate is Malcolm Elphinstone." It was, let's face it, crap. "Are you still there, Martin? You know you've got the Book Festival tomorrow, so you have. Do you want me to come up and give you moral support?"

"No, I don't. I'm going to cancel."

"There'll be a lot of interest."

"That's why I'm canceling." He put the phone down and returned to staring at the ceiling.

Martin was running on empty, he had eaten nothing since yesterday, apart from the packet of Minstrels he had shared with Clare in the police car. He had spent a large part of the day feeling sick and nauseous for one reason or another--the lurid hangover of earlier this morning, the blood and gore besmirching his lovely house, the sight of Richard Mott's zombie face--but now he felt suddenly ravenous. He would have liked a proper high tea-- poached orange-yolked eggs on hot, buttery toast. And on the table a big china pot of tea and a cake shaped like a drum--a cherry Genoa or a frosted walnut. And his wife, quietly knitting in a corner somewhere.

He might have been in a different room at the Four Clans, but the "minibar" was still devoid of anything edible. The sight of a can of Irn-Bru lurking in its innards made his stomach turn. He wanted to go home. He wanted to go to his house and crawl into his own bed and pull the covers over his head and make it all go away, but it would never go away because this was his punishment. And his punishment wouldn't be finished until his entire life had been dismantled and all the little pieces of it had been fed through a mangle until they were flat, and no one would ever be able to put him back together again. One minute he was a full-fledged member of society, and with a tick of the clock, a turn of the screw, he had become an outcast. It took only the littlest thing. The arc inscribed by the baseball bat, a bowl of borscht, and a girl unwrapping her hair.

A beautiful girl with blond hair wanted to meet him (Marty) in the Caviar Bar of the Grand Hotel Europe. He wondered if, being a foreigner, she found something attractive in his hesitant, stuttering Britishness, if instead of dullness she saw reticent charm.

He had taken the grocer to the Grand Hotel Europe for afternoon tea, but the man had made a great performance of examining the little sandwiches and cakes and saying, "You don't get much for your money, do you?" as if he were paying, not Martin. There were a lot of girls around, very well-dressed Russian girls, and the dying gro-cer raised his eyebrows at Martin and nodded his head in the direc-tion of one of them and said, "We know what they are, don't we?" and Martin said, "Do we?" The grocer snorted at what he saw as Martin's ignorance and made a face. "St. Petersburg brides," he said and laughed. A flake of smoked salmon had adhered to one of his fleshy lips. Martin wondered what was the point of anything. Being with the grocer was like being with a walking, talking memento mori. "No, really," Martin said earnestly to him, "I think they're just attractive young women, I don't think they're ...you know."

"Yes, but what would you know, Martin?" the grocer said pa-tronizingly.

They had taken tea in the light, airy space of the cafe, but the Caviar Bar was a darker, more sophisticated place, with its stained glass and copper, Russian Style Moderne. "We call it Art Nou-veau," he said to Irina.

"Da?" she replied, as if it were the most fascinating thing any-one had ever said to her.

Even now, a year later, he could see the red and black pearls of caviar glistening on their little glass dishes of crushed ice. He didn't eat any, the idea of fish was bad enough, but the thought of fish eggs was repellent. Irina didn't seem to notice, she ate all of it. They drank champagne, Russian and cheap, but surprisingly good. She had ordered it without asking him and then clinked his glass and said, "We have good time, Marty." She had changed for the evening, her hair was pinned up and her boots had been ex-changed for shoes, but her dress was high necked and modest. He wanted to ask her why she was selling souvenirs from an outdoor stall--had she fallen on hard times or was it a vocation--but he couldn't communicate something so complex.

He had spent the intervening hours between the Idiot and the Grand Hotel thinking about this upcoming encounter. He had imagined them chatting happily, her English magically improved and his few words of uneasy Russian transformed into fluency. He should have been with everyone else on an outing to the ballet at the Mariinsky Theater but had claimed a "bit of a tummy bug" when the grocer had come calling for him. The man went away disgruntled, an upset stomach not a valid excuse, apparently, to a man dancing with death.

Martin had worried that Irina might have misinterpreted this whole scenario, that she would want payment, but the fact that she had footed the bill in the cafe seemed to imply that she wasn't selling herself. Perhaps she wanted to find a husband. He wouldn't mind, not really. No one would look at her in the St. James Center the way they would a Thai bride. You wouldn't be able to tell just by looking at her that she'd been purchased. (Or would you?) "Yes, Irina Canning, my wife. Oh, she's Russian, you know.We met in St. Petersburg and fell in love.A very romantic city." She would learn English, he would learn Russian. They would have small half-Russian children, "Sasha and Anastasia." He would provide her with what she wanted--financial security, a lovely home, children brought up in the affluent West, health care for an aging mother, an education for a younger sibling, and so on, and in return she would give him the illusion of love. Profit and loss, goods and services, that was what it was all about, after all. Business. At some point they had stopped drinking champagne and started drinking vodka. The vodka was so cold it gave him neuralgia across his scalp.

Martin realized he was quite drunk. He wasn't a drinker, one glass of good wine in the evening was his limit, and he didn't have either the head or the stomach for cheap champagne combined with 80 percent proof Russian vodka. Time began to lurch for-ward in a series of snapshots, one minute he was rifling through his wallet looking for enough rubles to pay the bill, and the next he was in the front seat of a taxi being driven at a reckless and frightening speed. He wondered if he had been kidnapped. He heard Irina murmur something in Russian to the taxi driver. Martin tried to fasten his seat belt, but the taxi driver growled nyet at him and then said something to Irina that made her laugh. "Not necessary," he said, as if Martin had insulted his driving skills. Martin laughed as well, he had given over control of his life to a crazy Russian taxi driver and a Russian would-be bride. He ex-perienced an unexpected feeling of buoyancy, something was going to happen, something was going to change.

In a drawer in the bedside table at the Four Clans, he found a glossy plastic card with the menus and phone numbers for local takeaways. His stomach rumbled, and a jet of acid caught him in the throat. He could phone for a pizza, but he knew that when it arrived it would look as unappetizing as it did in the photograph in the menu, and anyway he didn't have enough money to cover it. "Just nipping out for a bite to eat," he said to the receptionist. He knew there was no reason for him to account to her for his movements, but Martin couldn't shake off the oppressive sense of being in custody at the Four Clans. He had hardly any money to his name, he supposed he could get chips or maybe a bowl of soup somewhere cheap.

"Good for you," the receptionist said indifferently. She had a smear of what looked like blood on her chin, but Martin thought it was more likely to be tomato ketchup.

He ended up in an Internet cafe where the prices were cheap. It looked like an old-fashioned corner shop, except that it was painted black, and written in some kind of Day-Glo purple on the outside was the name E-COFFEE. Inside it smelled of old coffee grounds and artificial vanilla. Martin ordered a tomato soup that tasted of stale dried oregano but came within his meager budget.

Surrounded by the computers of the Internet cafe, he realized again how acutely he missed the constant companionship of his laptop. He had mentioned its disappearance to Inspector Suther-land, who hadn't shown much interest beyond taking down a note of the details. Martin could see that it must be quite low on his list of priorities. "An awful lot of things seemed to have happened to you in the last twenty-four hours, Mr. Canning," he said. "Still," he added cheerfully, "just think, one day, when this is all over, you'll be able to write about it."

For a brief moment Martin thought about logging on to the Internet, he vaguely wondered if his death had made any difference to his position on Amazon (it could go either way, he supposed). He decided, however, against looking at Amazon or Googling his own name (or Richard's). He really didn't want to find evidence of his own death disseminated all over the Web.

When he had paid for the soup with the change from his pock-ets, he was left with sixty-one pence to his name. He was only a ten-minute walk from his office--he made a determined effort to get rid of the quotation marks--and thought he might take a stroll along there and check it out, perhaps tomorrow he could escape the Four Clans, buy a blow-up air bed, and bivouac on the lami-nate flooring of the office. Martin couldn't imagine ever moving back into his own house--even when the police were finished with it, how would he ever rid the memory of Richard Mott's murder from his (ironically named) living room? And how would he ever get the room cleaned up, anyway? He couldn't imagine the women of Favors in their nice pink overalls scrubbing bits of Richard Mott's brain matter off the carpets and walls.

The office had a toilet and a tiny kitchen with a kettle and mi-crowave. Everything he needed, really. In the office he could live his life simply and without ornament, like the monk he had never been.

They had gone camping quite a lot when he was young--with the Scouts (Christopher fitting in with jovial fakery, Martin getting by) and several times with their parents, when their mother took on the role of Harry's obedient corporal, endlessly boiling kettles on the rickety Primus stove while Harry himself instructed his pint-size troops in the blacker survival arts (breaking a rabbit's neck, tickling a trout, wrestling an eel). Survival, it seemed, wasn't possible without killing something else.

Nina Riley was a great one for camping, of course. She had learned to love the outdoor life in Switzerland during the war and frequently loaded up provisions in the boot of her Bristol and took to the hills of her Highland home. She had a pair of stout walking boots, an army-style tent, and an old-fashioned canvas ruck-sack with leather straps in which she carried her thermos and thick sandwiches of beef and mustard. She boiled up water from peat-brown burns to make tea. She caught fish--trout in the rivers or mackerel from a sea loch--then she fried her fresh-caught fish for breakfast before setting off for a daylong hike, during the course of which she might well come across something suspicious and have to spy on it. "Looks jolly suspicious to me, Bertie. I think our friend's a bit of a blackguard." Bertie himself never got to speak much. The television producer had suggested to Martin that Nina and Bertie should "have some sexual tension going on. They're both a bit bland, you know?" Martin wondered if he was going mad, if this was what it felt like.

He passed the circus on the Meadows on his way from the cafe to the office. He had always found circuses unsettling, the per-formers fragile and quite superfluous to the needs of the planet, yet they seemed to Martin to behave as if they knew things he didn't. The Mysteries. A Russian circus. Of course. What else? The whole of Mother Russia come to town to bring him to jus-tice over their lost daughter. "Here this doll special, very good artist. Scenes from Pushkin, Pushkin famous Russian writer.You know him?" Kafka had taken over the authorship of his life. He was being deleted, wiped out of memory and history, and quite rightly because that was what he had done to Irina. He had thrown her away like rubbish. He had erased her from the earth, and he in turn was being erased.

Someone had been in the office. The place hadn't been trashed or turned over, it was little things--the microwave door was open, and in the bin in the kitchen there was an empty polystyrene box, a half-eaten burger, and an empty Coke can. There was a sweet wrapper on the floor, a chair was on the other side of the room from where it usually was. The different-colored pads of Post-it notes he kept squared up against one another on the desk had all been moved around. It wasn't so much as if a thief had been in; it was more as if an untidy secretary without enough work to do had spent the afternoon in here being bored.

He opened the drawers of the desk, everything was still in order, the pens and pencils neatly aligned, the paper clips and the highlighters in the right place. Only one thing was missing. Martin knew what it would be, of course, before he even opened the drawer. The CD that was the backup of Death on the Black Isle, the last refuge of his novel. He slumped into the high-end office chair that came with the rental. That was when he noticed that a pink Post-it note had been torn off the pad and stuck in the middle of the unadorned white wall opposite the desk. Someone had written a message for him on it. "Fuck you, Martin." He felt a tattoo of pulses and thuds in his chest. Something viral was happening to him. From his wake-up call this morning to his incarceration at the Four Clans this evening, everything had been unrelentingly awful.

His wake-up call this morning! It had been from Richard. 1 missed call. He'd been in too much of a stupor to answer, and then he had forgotten all about it. He must tell the police. It was an im-portant piece of evidence. He took out his phone, it was down to its last bar of battery.

He wished now that he had answered the phone this morning, he might have been the last person that Richard spoke to. "Oh, my God," Martin said out loud, his mouth making the same oval of horror as the flaming witch on the engraving in his room at the Four Clans. What if Richard had phoned him during . . . his or-deal? What if he'd been looking desperately for help? If Martin had answered the call--could he have prevented Richard's death in some way? ("Stop, you blackguard!") Martin put his head on the desk and moaned. But then he had a thought. He lifted his head and gazed at the pink Post-it note stuck to the wall. Richard had phoned at ten o'clock, Martin remembered looking at the time on the clock radio by his bed at the Four Clans, but Superintendent Campbell said that Richard died between four and seven o'clock in the morning, so he couldn't have phoned at ten. Unless he had phoned him from beyond the grave. On cue, in a way that even Nina Riley couldn't have arranged, the phone in his hand chirped. The tom-tom thuds of his heart grew wilder, more erratic. "Richard Mott," the screen said.

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

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

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

Chapter 32

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He didn't hang around to find out, instead he was off again, helter-skeltering around the parked convoy. The chase was telling on him, his ribs aching so much he could barely keep upright. Just when he thought he was going to have to give up this game of hide-and-seek, someone or something (he hoped it was someone) grabbed him by the arm and pulled him into the dark.

Not entirely dark, just enough light to make him realize he was somewhere in the hinterlands of the big top, the space where the performers waited to make their entrance. Ahead of him a tunnel led to the ring itself, it reminded him for a moment of the Colosseum. He had taken Marlee to Rome last year. They had eaten a lot of ice cream and pizza. All his recent memories were of holi-days.

There was enough light, too, to catch a glimpse of the knife glinting near his throat. His first thought was that it was Terence Smith with his Clue armory, but there was surely no way he could have got here so fast. He twisted his neck round, felt the knife scratching dangerously near an artery. The dead girl look-alike. She smiled. She had a feral look about her that didn't invite smiling back. All that was needed were a few clowns and the night-mare would be complete.

"Shut up, okay?" she said. She sounded foreign, he didn't know why that should be a surprise, everyone he encountered seemed to be foreign.

"Okay," he agreed. She moved the knife an inch away from his neck. He was so close to her that he could smell the cigarette smoke on her, mingled with perfume. It made him want a ciga-rette. It made him want sex. An idea that surprised him, consid-ering the circumstances. He wondered if the earrings were the sign of a cult, some born-again Christian thing. She didn't look like any Christian he'd met before, but you never could tell. Had she saved him from the police in order to kill him? That made no sense, but then nothing made any sense.

"You look like someone who's dead," he whispered. Yes, he had decided this was a conversation killer, but here he was using it anyway.

"I know,"she said. This was an unexpected answer. She lowered the knife a little more.

"Your sister?" he hazarded.

"No, friend,"she said, and with a shrug, "we look alike, that's all."

"Honda Man--Terence Smith--why did he attack you?"

Her green eyes narrowed and she laughed derisively. "The gimp?" she said contemptuously. "He's idiot."

"Yeah, I know he's idiot, but he still tried to kill you."

She made some kind of gesture that he suspected was obscene where she came from. Russia, by the sound of her. "Da," she agreed. She seemed impressively unflustered by the fact that someone had just tried to kill her. He wondered if it happened to her a lot.

"I saw you at the circus," he said.

"Circus is illegal now?" she said. She wasn't good at small talk.

"What's your name?" he ventured. "My name's Jackson Brodie." I used to be a policeman.

"I don't have a name, I don't exist," she hissed, "and you won't if you don't shut up." Really bad at small talk.

"We're on the same side," Jackson said. It seemed unlikely, but wasn't his enemy's enemy his friend?

"I'm not on side. Listen--"A little jab of the knife in his ribs to get his attention.

"That hurts."

"So?"

He couldn't imagine why he had worried about her being attacked. Another little poke with the knife in his ribs.

"Okay, okay, I'm listening," he said.

"Stop putting your nose in places, I'm taking care of it."

"Taking care of what?"

She dug the point of the knife further into his ribs, the bruised, aching ribs, and said, "We can go now," in a decisive way that brooked no argument. She walked him across the circus ring, eerily dark and robbed of illusion, and made him crawl under the flap on the other side, behind the tiers of empty seats. Out on the grass, in the cool night air, there was no sign of Terence Smith or the police.

"I save your bacon," she said and laughed, apparently pleased with her mastery of English metaphor. "Now get lost." She started walking away, she was barefoot but she didn't seem to notice. He followed her, limping along, a lame dog. "Fuck off," she said without looking back at him.

"Tell me about your friend, the dead girl in the water," he per-sisted. "Who was she?" She carried on walking but raised the knife so he could see it. It was smaller than he thought, but it looked sharp and she definitely had the air of someone who would use it without any qualms. He had respect for knives, he'd seen a lot of stabbing victims in his time, and most of them weren't around to talk about the experience.

"Did Terence Smith kill your friend?" They passed a knot of people who didn't even give them a second glance--the barefoot girl, the knife, the limping man, the dubious dialogue--Jackson supposed they were taken for Fringe performers.

"You're big nuisance, Jackson Brodie!" the girl shouted. They reached a main thoroughfare and suddenly there was traffic and people everywhere. Jackson vaguely recognized the street, it was near the museum on Chambers Street, near the Sheriff Court, scene of his disgrace this morning. Hard to believe it was still the same day.

He was desperately trying to make sense of things before she es-caped him. Terence Smith had tried to kill the crazy Russian girl. The crazy Russian girl was a friend of his dead girl. Terence Smith had attacked him and told him to forget what he had seen. Jack-son thought he meant the road-rage incident, but what if he meant what had happened on Cramond Island? Because he was the only witness who knew the girl was dead, apart from the crazy Russian girl. And Terence Smith had just tried to kill her. For the first time since he'd taken his unwelcome dip in the river, he could see something that made sense. A tangible connection, not just a coincidence.

The Russian girl was waiting to cross the road, hovering on the edge of the pavement, looking for a gap in the cars like a greyhound impatient for the trap to open. The traffic slowed to a halt at the red light just as he caught up with her, and he made a grab for her arm to hold her back. He half-expected to be stabbed or bitten, but she just glared at him. The green man on the pedes-trian flashed and beeped behind them, people hurrying across. It turned back to red and she was still glaring at him. He wondered if he was going to turn to stone.

A sudden loud bang made Jackson jump. He had once watched his own house explode and tended to be wary of loud noises.

"It's firework," the girl said, "for Tattoo." Sure enough, in the distance, a huge flower of glittering sparks bloomed above the Castle and fell slowly to earth. Then, without warning, she leaned toward him and put her lips close to his ear as if she were going to kiss him, but instead she said, "Real Homes for Real People," then she laughed as if she had made an incredibly funny joke.

"What?" She turned to go, pulling her arm away, and he said, "Stop, don't go, wait. How can I get in touch with you?"

She laughed again and said, "Ask for Jojo."And then she crossed on the red man, holding up the cars with an imperious salute. She really did have perfect legs.

By the time he ducked into the Traverse, Julia and the rest of the company were long gone. He presumed Julia would be at home, but when he finally made it back to the flat, there was no sign of her, even though it was after midnight. He tried phoning, but her phone was turned off. He was so tired that he hardly noticed when she slipped into bed next to him.

"Where were you?" she said.

"Where were you?" he said. Question with a question. It felt like an old war, one he'd fought several times. His phone rang before hostilities escalated. Louise Monroe asking him what he was like when he was fourteen. She had a son, it turned out. He wouldn't have figured her for a mother.

"Why are women phoning you in the middle of the night asking you about your teenage years?" Julia asked sleepily.

"Maybe they find me interesting." Julia chuckled, deep and throaty, it set off a cough, and by the time she'd recovered, it was too late to ask her why she found that so funny.

Chapter 33

Louise dialed his number from her car and, before he even had time to say anything, asked, "What were you like when you were fourteen?"

"Fourteen?"

"Yes, fourteen,"she repeated. The sound of his voice was a kick. He was just the right side of wrong.

"I don't know," he said finally. "I was no altar boy, certainly. A bit of a tearaway, I suppose, like a lot of lads at that age."

"I know absolutely nothing about fourteen-year-old boys."

"Well, why should you?"

"My son's fourteen."

"Your son?" He sounded astonished. "I didn't realize you were ..."

"A mother?" she supplied. "I know it's hard to believe, but there you go, it's the old story--sperm meets egg and bam. It can happen to the best of us." She sighed. "Fourteen-year-olds are a nightmare." She realized that she was clutching the steering wheel of the car as if she were in rigor mortis.

"What's his name?"

"Archie." What's his name? That was a question a parent would ask, Louise thought. When Archie was born, the people who asked, "How much does he weigh?" all had babies themselves.

Guys who weren't fathers hadn't been interested in Archie's weight or what she was going to call him. So, she deduced, Jackson Brodie had kids. She didn't want to know about that, wasn't interested in secondhand guys with baggage. Kids were baggage, stuff you lugged around. Luggage.

"You have kids?" she asked. Just couldn't help herself.

"Just one, a girl," Jackson said. "Marlee. She's ten. I know nothing about ten-year-old girls if it's any consolation."

"Archie's not a criminal," Louise said as if Jackson had accused him of something. "He's basically harmless."

"I nearly landed in court for stealing when I was fifteen if it's any help."

"What happened?"

"I joined the army."

Jeez. Archie in the army, there's a thought.

"This is why you're calling?" he asked. "For advice about parenting?"

"No. I'm calling to tell you that I'm on a housing estate in Bur-diehouse."

"Great name for a housing estate." He sounded weary.

"I'm outside a shop that's been boarded up. I think it used to be a post office. There's a fish-and-chip shop on one side, a Scot-mid on the other side. Single story, commercial properties, no flats above, nothing remotely residential."

"Why are you telling me this and should you be there in the dark on your own?"

"That's very gallant of you, but I'm a big girl. I'm telling you because I thought you'd like to know that this is the address that Terence Smith gave to the court this morning."

"Honda Man gave a false address?"

"Which is an offense. As you know. I told you that you were an idiot to plead guilty. And by the way, no one else caught the reg-istration of the car involved in the road-rage incident, so you held up the investigation by withholding vital information."

"So sue me," Jackson said. "I've just seen him, actually, he was trying to kill someone else."

"Terence Smith?" she said sharply. "Please tell me you didn't have another go at him?"

"No, although the police were keen to question me."

"Jesus, what is it with you?"

"Trouble is my friend."

"He was trying to kill someone? Is that one of your fantasies?"

"I don't have fantasies. Not about people killing each other, anyway. If I tell you what happened, you'll think I'm even more paranoid and delusional than you do already."

"Try me," she said.

"I saw a girl who looked like my dead girl, she even had the earrings."

"You're even more paranoid and delusional than I thought."

"Told you."

"You see dead girls everywhere."

"No, I see the same dead girl everywhere."

He was officially a lunatic, she decided. Strangely, that didn't make him less attractive. She sighed and said, "Anyway, cheers. I'm off home. Sleep well."

There were rules. The rules said, you don't fool around with wit-nesses, you don't fool around with suspects, you don't fool around with convicted felons. And Jackson Brodie managed to be all three at once. Yes, Louise, you surely know how to pick them. And, of course, you don't fool around with a man who already has a woman.

At least that explained why he was in Edinburgh. "For the Festival," he had said when she first interviewed him, but he hadn't seemed like the Festival type. Still didn't. But Julia was in a play.

"What's Julia like?"The naming of her had provoked an unexpected, visceral spasm of jealousy in Louise. Hold your tongue, bite your lip.

"She's an actress."That had surprised her. He frowned when he said her name.

Be honest. Honest was hard sometimes, even with herself. She was a natural dissembler. Even the word "dissembling" was a way of dissembling, of not just saying liar. Be honest, Louise, you fancy Jackson. Such an inane, adolescent word, "fancy." LOUISE MONROE FANCIES GRANT NIVEN written in the school toilets in fourth year. PC Louise Monroe and DI Michael Pirie in the back of an un-marked squad car in the wee small hours of his leaving "do." "Christ, I've always fancied you rotten, Louise." The dull gleam of his wedding ring in the dark, the push and shove of unbridled lechery that kick-started Archie. How odd that babies, the absolute inno-cents at the top of the moral heap, were created out of such vul-garity. The beast with two backs. Maybe it wasn't that she fancied Jackson exactly, maybe she just saw in him someone who had weathered the world and still had something left to give. "You can't have it both ways," one of her girlfriends said. "Tough and tender, men are like steaks, it's one or the other."Tough and tender, a con-tradiction in terms, Hegelian synthesis. Dualism, the Edinburgh disease. It was possible, Louise was sure, but perhaps only in a far-flung corner of the galaxy. Or with Jackson Brodie. Maybe.

She had noticed a chicken-pox scar beneath his eyebrow. Archie had one in almost the same place, a tiny shield-shaped depression in the skin that she supposed would last forever.

His dark hair was flecked with slate. At least he hadn't done the middle-aged male thing of growing a beard to hide a double chin, not that he had a double chin. He probably wouldn't look too bad with a beard. When she was younger she could never have imag-ined that she would find middle-aged men with graying hair or beards even remotely attractive. It just went to show. But let's not forget Julia. Still, she was an actress and he frowned when he men-tioned her name. Two strikes against Julia.

It was odd how you could feel so attracted to someone by the simplest things, the way they handed you a drink and said, "There you go." The dent of a chicken-pox scar, the cast of despair on their features when they said "Julia."

Louise slipped her car into the garage. She remembered Sandy Mathieson saying that a garage had just sold for a hundred thou-sand. The thing about Edinburgh was that even some of the best addresses in town didn't have garages, leaving the rich nobs stuck with the horrors of on-street parking, whereas Louise, in her modern, characterless (but still mind-blowingly expensive) estate house, had a double garage. Thank you, Graham Hatter. The urn that contained her mother was now sitting on a shelf in the garage, between a half-empty two-liter can of paint and a jar of nails. She gave the urn a mock salute as she got out of the car. "Hey, Mom."

Jellybean was waiting behind the front door to greet her. A deep thumping bass pulsated out of Archie's bedroom. Jellybean followed her up the stairs, he had to put all four paws on a step before he could move on up to the next, it wasn't long since he'd been like quicksilver on the stairs. The corkscrew in her heart moved a quarter turn.

"I was a bit of a tearaway, I suppose." "Tearaway" was a good word, she could use that next time Archie got into trouble. "Archie's a bit of a tearaway, but he's okay." More and more she had this troubling vi-sion of sitting in a courtroom, watching Archie in the dock, seeing his whole life go down the pan, and her life with it. "You placed him in a nursery when he was three months old and went back to work, Ms. Monroe? You have always put your career first, haven't you? You don't know who his father is?" Of course she knew, she just wasn't going to say. Harmless, my ass, she thought. He was a little shit, that's what he was.

She knocked on the door of Archie's room and went in quickly, without waiting for an answer. Always try and catch suspects off guard. Archie and Hamish (damn, she'd forgotten about Hamish) were huddled around Archie's computer. She heard Hamish's sotto voce warning, "Incoming, Arch."Archie turned off the computer screen as she came in the room. Porn, probably. She turned the music off. She shouldn't do that, really. He had rights after all. No, he didn't.

"Okay, boys?" she said. She could hear herself sounding like an officer of the law, not a mother.

"We're fine, Louise," said Hamish, giving her a big, cheesy grin. Fucking little Harry Potter. Archie said nothing, just glared at her, waiting for her to leave. If she'd had a girl they would be having little chats now, about clothes, boys, school. A girl would lie on her bed and look through her makeup, she would share her secrets, hopes, dreams, all the things Louise had never done with her own mother.

"You've got school tomorrow, you should be asleep."

"You're so right, Louise," Hamish said. "Come on, Archie, time to go bye-byes."

Little fucker, she thought as she left the room. She walked away and then tiptoed back to listen at the door. The music remained off, and they seemed to be reading from a book, first one voice, then the other. Not porn, anyway, although they were both sniggering as if it were. Hamish's confident tones, more masculine when incorporeal, declared, "'You know,I think there's more to this than meets the eye,Bertie,' Nina said.'Maud Elphinstone seems whiter than the proverbial driven snow, but methinks the lady doth protest too much.'" And Archie's swooping, cracked voice said, "'Why, Bertie, I do believe you're blushing.'"

Were they gay? How would she feel if her son was gay? Actually it would be quite a relief, she wouldn't have to deal with any of that macho bullshit in the future. Someone to go shopping with, that's what they (mothers of gay sons) always said, didn't they? She didn't like shopping, so that might be a bit of a problem.

"'I do believe you have a pash on the lovely Maud, Bertie.'"

For a moment, when they were saying good-bye, she thought Jackson was going to kiss her. What would she have done? Kissed him back, right there in the middle of the street, like a teenager. Louise Monroe has a pash on Jackson Brodie. Because Louise Monroe was an idiot, obviously.

Chapter 34

Gloria spent the evening at the hospital. She watched Graham closely and wondered if he was faking it, if he had decided that being dead to the world was a way of dodging all the problems that were piling up around him. "Can you hear me, Graham?" she whispered in his ear. If he could, he was keeping schtum about it.

The colossal wreck now as weak as a kitten, as quiet as a mouse. Ozymandias toppled. "Half sunk, a shattered visage lies." Gloria had been very fond of Shelley when she was younger. She had given Graham a beautifully illustrated Folio Society copy of the collected poems for his sixtieth birthday, on the basis that you should give a present you would like to receive yourself.

Naturally, being Graham, he had misread the poem, seeing only the triumphal hubris of "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: / Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Gloria couldn't think, offhand, of a present she had ever received from any member of her family that she had actually wanted. Last Christmas, Emily ("and Nick") bought her a food mixer, an inferior brand to the one she already owned, and Graham gave her a Jenners gift token, which hardly required much thought and had probably been bought by his saleswoman-cum-mistress-cum-would-be-wife, Maggie Louden. Gloria had had no intuition that the woman standing in front of her Christmas tree, waving away a mince pie,

was planning to be the next Mrs. Graham Hatter. "The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed."

She drank a cup of tea that a nice nurse brought her and flicked through a copy of the Evening News that she had bought from the shop downstairs. "Police are asking if anyone saw a young woman go into the water." Her eye was caught by the words "earrings in the shape of crucifixes." She put her tea down and read the short piece from the beginning again. "Go into the water"--what did that mean?

When she got home, Gloria went down to the basement to set the security system for the night. Something moved on one of the CCTV screens, a pair of eyes glowing monstrously in the night-- a fox, a big dog-fox, carrying off the remains of Gloria's supper from last night. Then, unexpectedly, the screen went blank.

Then all the other screens went blank, one by one. No little ro-bots moving this way and that, keeping their electronic eyes on things. The lights on the alarm system flickered and went out, and then all the electricity in the house failed. This was what it would be like for Graham when he died.

A fuse must have blown, Gloria told herself. Nothing to worry about. She felt her way in the absolute dark of the basement toward the wall where the fuse box was. Then she heard a noise. A footfall, a door opening, a floorboard creaking.

Her heart started thudding so loudly that she thought it must be like a beacon pinpointing her position in the dark. A man had been beaten to death in Merchiston this morning--who was to say that the murderer hadn't moved on to another suburb on the south side? She wished she had a weapon. She made a mental inventory of what was available. The garden shed provided the biggest arsenal--weed-killer sprays, an ax, the electric hedge trimmer, the strimmer--she imagined you could probably do quite a bit of damage to someone's ankles with a strimmer. Unfortunately there was no way she could get to the garden shed without passing whoever was in the house. Did they have eyes of diamond and jet, were they as tall as a bear?

She suddenly remembered Maggie Louden's words: "Is it done yet, is it over? Have you got rid of Gloria?" What if she wasn't talking about divorce, what if she was talking about murder?

Of course, that was exactly what Graham would do! If he di-vorced Gloria, he would lose half of everything he had, and no way in the world would Graham be prepared to do that, but if Gloria died he could keep everything. It was as melodramatic a concept as anything in Emmerdale yet somehow perfectly credible. He would hire someone--Graham had a way of never getting his own hands dirty. He would pay someone to get rid of her. Or he would use Terry. Yes, that was what he would do, he would use Terry.

Gloria held her hand over her heart in an attempt to muffle its telltale thumping. Another floorboard creaked, much closer this time, and Gloria realized that there was someone standing at the top of the basement stairs, a figure outlined faintly with an aura of moonlight from the atrium skylight in the hall.

The figure started to descend the stairs. Gloria took a deep breath and said stoutly, "I think you should know before you come any farther that I am armed." A lie, of course, but in these circumstances the truth was hardly a weapon. The figure hesitated, it bent down to get a better view of the basement, and then a fa-miliar voice said, "Hello, Gloria."

Gloria gave a little scream of horror and said, "I thought you were dead."

Chapter 35

When Martin returned to the Four Clans, he found the prison-governor receptionist had been replaced by the night porter from last night. Hadn't Sutherland said he was on holiday? He handed Martin his key, barely looking up from the Evening News that was spread out on the cheap veneer of the reception counter. A cigarette teetered precariously from the edge of his lip.

"Do you remember me?" Martin asked. "Do you know who I am?"

The night porter tore himself away from the newspaper, an inch of ash dropped from his cigarette. He glanced up at Martin and then, as if seeing nothing of interest, returned to his paper. "Yeah," he said, turning over a page, "you're that dead guy, aren't you?"

"Yes," Martin agreed, "I'm that dead guy."