THURSDAY

Chapter 36

Arooster crowed. There was no better alarm clock. He remembered it was Sunday, his favorite day of the week, and he stretched all four limbs luxuriously in the bed. No need to get up and go to work. He was no longer writing, thank God, he had found an odd kind of liberation in donning a suit and tie every weekday morning and commuting up to London to toil in a con-servative office with high ceilings and big old-fashioned desks, a place where the juniors and the secretaries called him "Mr. Canning" and the chairman clapped him on the back and said, "How's that wonderful woman you married, old chap?" He didn't know what he did in the office all day, but at lunchtime he went out to a restaurant where the waitresses wore white broidery anglaise aprons and little caps on their heads and brought him oxtail soup and steamed puddings with custard. And in the afternoon, at three on the dot, his secretary (June, or perhaps Angela), a cheerful young woman with crisp shorthand and soft twinsets, brought him a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits.

The rooster didn't know it was a day of rest. He was soon joined by the other birds, Martin could pick out the thread of the joyful warble of a blackbird from the tapestry of birdsong, but the identity of the other birds in the pattern was a mystery. His (wonderful) wife would know, she was a country girl, born and bred. A farm girl. A wholesome, milk-fed farm girl. He propped himself up on an elbow and studied her wholesome farm-girl face. In repose, she was even more lovely, although it was the kind of loveliness that inspired respectful admiration in other men rather than lust. Even the idea of lust would have sullied her. She was beyond reproach. A strand of her soft brown hair lay across her face. He moved it gently away and kissed the priceless ruby bow of her lips.

He would make her breakfast in bed. A proper breakfast, eggs and bacon, fried bread. For lunch today they would roast a piece of good English beef, meat was still on the ration but the village butcher was a friend. Everyone was their friend. He wondered why he was so frequently a carnivore in this other life.

The morning would follow its usual happy Sunday pattern. When lunch was nearly ready--the gravy thickening, the beef resting--he would laugh (because it was their little joke) and say to her, "A little preprandial, darling?" and bring out the Waterford sherry decanter that had belonged to her parents. Then they would sip their amontillado and sit on the armchairs covered in "StrawberryThief "and listen to Schubert's Trout Quintet.

He could hear a tap running in the bathroom and the tread of feet along the hallway and down the stairs. Peter/David was making airplane noises, fighting the Luftwaffe single-handed. Martin heard him say, "Take that, you filthy Nazi!" before making the ack-ack sounds of a machine gun. He was a good boy, he would grow up like his father, not like Martin. Yesterday evening when they had been sitting in their cozy living room (roaring fire, etc.), Martin toasting crumpets, his wife knitting yet another Fair Isle pullover, after Peter/David had kissed them both good night and gone up to bed, his wife paused over her needles and said with a smile, "I think he deserves to have a little brother or sister, don't you?"A moment to treasure in a life of treasures.

He stretched again and put his arms round his wife and smelled her lily-of-the-valley hair. She wriggled a little, a sign that she was awake and willing. He put a hand inside the folds of her night-gown and found the apple roundness of a breast and pressed his body against hers. He should say something loving at this point, something tender. He always had trouble with the intimacies of conversation with her for some reason, perhaps if he gave her a name it would help. She rolled over and returned his embrace. "Marty," she said.

He woke with a start. The cheap digital clock radio on the bed-side table informed him that it was six o'clock in the morning. He wondered if he should check under the covers to make sure he hadn't turned into a giant insect.

Daylight had already overtaken the streetlamp outside and fil-tered through the thin orange curtains, bathing the room in the glow of a postnuclear sunrise. The lurid Lucozade light washed over Martin's face. He couldn't imagine how he would get back to sleep again. The walls of the room were tissue thin. Every toi-let flushed, every hawking phlegmy cough, every sexual act attempted or achieved, all seemed to be finding a direct conduit to Martin's room.

What if somehow he was stuck here, if he had entered some surreal loop where he must wake up every morning in a different room at the Four Clans? How many rooms were there in the hotel? What if it was an infinite number, what if it was one of those Twilight Zone places with a nonexistent thirteenth floor and a staff who were really the ghosts of previous guests? A hotel you could never check out from.

He knew, in the sober light of day, that it was not Richard Mott who had phoned him last night. Which was most likely, after all-- that Richard Mott was phoning him from the afterlife or that the person who killed Richard Mott had stolen his phone? A mur-derer phoning him was preferable to a corpse phoning him. Of course this was something he should tell the police about, but the idea of having to encounter Sutherland again was too depressing. He wondered what Richard Mott's killer would have said to him if his phone hadn't run out of battery power. "You next," perhaps. An eye for an eye.

He had said to Melanie last night that he was going to cancel his appearance at the Book Festival, but now it struck him that it would be a badge of courage to turn up. "Pull yourself together, boy! Face the thing you're frightened of." He might have been reduced to a plaything of the gods, but he was still Alex Blake. This was his life, this was his arena, it may not have been a very noble one, but it was all that was left to him.

He had lost his laptop, his wallet, his novel, his home, and his identity over the course of the previous forty-eight hours. All he had left was Alex Blake.

Reception was now being manned by a boy in a striped satin waistcoat and a bow tie who looked as if he belonged in a bar-bershop quartet.

"Can I use the phone?" Martin asked, and the boy said, "Cer-tainly, Mr. Canning. My mother's read all the Alex Blake books, she's your number one fan."

"Thank you, thank her. That's very kind."

From his pocket he fished out the flyer that had been given to him a lifetime ago. "Can I help you?" he had said. Well, he did need help. He needed just one person to be on his side. "Face the thing you're frightened of. Pull yourself together, you fucking fairy.You're an old woman, Martin."

He was not going to be cowed by unfounded suspicion, nor by dead men phoning him. He was going to hold his head high and carry on. Cosmic justice could come and get him, but it would be on his own terms.

He dialed the number and, when it was answered, said, "Mr. Brodie? I don't know if you remember me?"

Chapter 37

Jackson rolled over in the bed and spooned Julia's hot body. She usually slept naked but was now wearing a pair of horrendous pa-jamas that were much too big for her and might at some point have belonged to her sister. Jackson knew the pajamas were sig-nificant, but he didn't particularly want to think what that significance might be. He missed the feeling of skin on skin, the peachy roundness of Julia. He fitted himself into the familiar curves and cambers of her body, but instead of pushing back and settling into his shape, she shifted away from him, murmuring something incomprehensible. Julia talked a lot in her sleep, all of it gibberish, but nonetheless Jackson had taken to listening intently in case she divulged something secret and hidden that he would feel better (or, more likely, worse) for knowing.

He moved closer to her again and kissed her neck, but she remained steadfastly asleep. It was difficult to wake Julia up, short of shaking her. Once, he had made love to her while she slept, and she'd hardly even twitched when he came inside her, but he didn't tell her about it afterward because he wasn't sure how she would react. He couldn't imagine her being particularly put out (this was Julia, after all). She would probably just have said, "Without me? How could you?" Technically it was rape, of course. He had arrested enough guys in his time for taking advantage of drunk or drugged girls. Plus, if he was honest, Julia was such a sound sleeper that there had been a touch of necrophilia about the whole thing. He'd put a necrophiliac away once, the guy worked in a mortuary and didn't "see where the harm was" because "the objects of my affection have moved beyond earthly matters."

Between Amelia's pajamas and necrophilia, Jackson had pretty much managed to kill off any desire he might have woken up with. Julia was probably still annoyed with him, anyway. Jackson placed his ear to her back like a stethoscope and listened to her rattling breath. He had done the same for a three-year-old Marlee when she'd had bronchitis. Julia's lungs would kill her in the end. There was something about her that suggested she would never make old bones, that long before she was drawing her pension she'd have emphysema and be lugging around an oxygen tank as tall as herself. She wriggled farther away from him.

Everything was subject to entropy, even sex, even love. A slow era-sure of passion. Not his love for his daughter, obviously, that was the one unbreakable bond. Or his sister. He had loved his sister with a true heart, but Niamh was too far "beyond earthly matters" now for him to feel the tug and urgency of love. The sadness was all that was left.

He propped himself up on an elbow and studied Julia's face. He had a feeling that she wasn't really asleep, that she might be acting.

"Don't," she said and rolled over, pressing her face into the pillow.

When he woke again, Julia was kneeling on the bed next to him, wearing only a towel and holding a tray on which he could see coffee, scrambled eggs, toast. "Breakfast!" she announced gaily. Jackson's watch said seven o'clock.

"For a minute I thought you were Julia," he said.

"Ha, funny. I couldn't sleep." Her damp hair was bundled into a demented ponytail on one side of her head, and she smelled soapy clean. She was naturally spotlighted by the sun, caught in a lozenge of light, and he could see the dark rings around her eyes, the shadow of something mortal on her brow. Maybe it was just disappointment. She settled cross-legged onto the bed and read out his horoscope to him. "'Sagittarians are having a tough time at the moment.You feel as if you're getting nowhere, but never fear--there is light at the end of the tunnel.' Are you? Having a tough time?" she asked.

"No more than usual."

He didn't ask her what her stars said, that would have been to give a kind of credence to something he considered to be non-sense. He suspected Julia thought it was nonsense as well, and it was all part of some affectation.

"No, of course, this is yesterday's paper," Julia said. "We don't know what's in store for you today. Did you have a tough time yesterday? Oh, yes, you did, didn't you? Fighting in the street, brawling, killing dogs--"

"I didn't kill the dog."

"Thrown in jail, convicted of an offense. They'll never take you back in the police now, sweetie."

"I don't want to go back to the police."

"Yes, you do."

It was surprising what a burnt offering for breakfast could do to a man's spirits. The eggs were rubbery and the toast was charred, but Jackson managed to get it all down. He had been expecting to breakfast on the cold leftovers of last night's argument, so the eggs and Julia's general air of benevolence were a pleasant surprise.

Julia sipped a cup of weak tea, and when he asked her why she wasn't eating--Julia loved food the way a dog does--she said, "Funny tummy. First-night nerves. The press is going to be in, how ghastly is that? The idea of the show being reviewed is terri-fying, almost as terrifying as it not being reviewed. And you know it's the Festival, so we won't get a proper theater critic, they're too busy on the Next Best Thing, we'll get some nerd who usually

subs the sports section. If only we had another preview."

"How did it go last night?"

"Oh, you know"--she shrugged--"awful."

Jackson's heart went out to her.

"I'm sorry I was grumpy with you," Julia said.

"I was grumpy too," Jackson said magnanimously. He didn't think he had been, really, but it didn't hurt to be a little chivalrous, espe-cially as he presumed the logical outcome of Julia in a towel making him breakfast in bed was going to be sex, but when he made a play-ful grab at her, she jumped off the bed as neatly as a cat and said, "I have to get on, I've got so much to do."At the door to the bedroom, she turned back and said, "I love you, you know."At the beginning of a relationship, Jackson had noticed on more than one occasion in his own life, people looked happy when they said "I love you," but at the end they said the same words and looked sad. Julia looked pos-itively tragic. But then that was Julia, always overacting.

Jackson's phone rang and he considered not answering it. Good news always sleeps till noon, isn't that what they said--or were those the lyrics to a Cowboy Junkies song? He answered it and had to riff on his memory for a while before the name meant something. Martin. Martin Canning, the guy who threw the briefcase at Terence Smith. An odd little guy.

"Hey, Martin," Jackson said, adopting a false kind of cama-raderie because the guy sounded slightly unhinged. "How can I help you?"

"I wonder if you could do me a favor, Mr. Brodie?"

Jackson could no longer hear the word "favor" without thinking it had dark implications. "Sure, Martin. I haven't got anything else to do today. And it's Jackson, call me Jackson."

"What are you going to do today?" Julia asked, fully dressed now and too distracted by her own day to be truly curious about his. She was applying her makeup in a little mirror propped up on the kitchen table. A light dusting of face powder had fallen on a pyra-mid of oranges balanced in a glass oven dish. Jackson didn't remember buying any fruit.

"I've got a job," he said.

"A job?"

"Yes, a job. Some guy wants babysitting today."

"Babysitting?"

Jackson wondered if she would just keep echoing back to him what he said to her. Wasn't this what the queen was supposed to do? It gave the impression of polite conversation, it gave the im-pression that you were genuinely interested in what the other person was saying without you having to actually engage with them on any meaningful level, or even listen to them. Testing the the-ory, he said to Julia, "And then I thought I might go and drown myself in the Forth," but instead of parroting "the Forth?" Julia turned and gazed at him thoughtfully, seeing him rather than looking at him, and said, "Drowned?"

Jackson sensed the mistake immediately. Julia's eldest sister, Sylvia, had drowned herself in the bath, a formidable act of will that Jackson almost admired. She was a nun, so Jackson supposed all those years of discipline had put the iron in her soul. His own sister hadn't drowned, she had been raped and strangled and then dumped in a canal. Water, water, everywhere. They were linked, he and Julia, by these things. "Like some kind of karmic concate-nation," she had ruminated once. He had to look up the word "concatenation," it had sounded Catholic, but it wasn't. From the Latin "catena," a chain. The chain of evidence. Chain of fools. He wished now he'd had a classical education rather than an army ed-ucation. A good school, a degree, the world his own daughter was growing up in. The world Julia had grown up in, but then look how fucked up that had been. He wanted to tell Julia about the woman in the Forth, about his own near-drowning experience, but she had returned to herself, applying lipstick, peering at her lips in the mirror with professional detachment, smacking them together and making a face as if she were kissing her reflection.

Jackson wondered what it said about a relationship when you were unable to tell the "object of your affection" that you had been pulled out of the water like a half-drowned dog. "Lucky"-- inevitably--had been the name of the dog that had scooted with joy off the pier at Whitby. The owner of the dog, the first man to drown that day, had a wife and eight-year-old daughter, and Jackson had wondered what had happened to the dog. Had they taken Lucky home with them?

"But you'll be finished in time for the show?" Julia said.

"The show?"

As she was going out the door, Julia said, "Oh, while I remember, can you do me a favor? I dropped the memory card off at the chemist next to the flat. I thought if you didn't have anything better to do you could pick the photographs up."

"And what if I do have something better to do?"

"Do you?" Julia asked, curiosity rather than sarcasm in her voice.

"Hang on," Jackson said, "back up--what photographs? What memory card?"

"The one from our camera."

"But I lost the camera," he said, "I told you I lost it at Cramond."

"I know, and I told you that I phoned up the police lost prop-erty at Fettes and someone had handed it in."

"What? You didn't tell me that."

"Yes, I did,"Julia said, "unless there was someone else lying next to me in bed pretending to be Jackson."

When had Julia had time to drop things off at the chemist, to fill up the fruit bowl, to make phone calls, have lunch with Richard Mott? And yet she hadn't had a second to give to him.

"Scott Marshall," she continued blithely, "that nice boy who plays my lover, drove out to Fettes and picked it up for me."

"They just handed it over to him?" Jackson said, astonished ("my lover," the way she said it, so casual). "Without any proof?" He thought of the image of the dead girl trapped in the camera. Had someone looked at it, developed it?

"I described the first three photographs on the memory card over the phone," Julia said, "and that seemed to satisfy them. And I told them that someone named Scott Marshall would be picking them up. He showed them his driver's license. Crikey, Jackson, do we have to dissect every aspect of police procedure regarding lost prop-erty?"

"What are the first three photographs on the memory card?" Jackson asked.

"Are you testing me?"

"No, no, I'm intrigued. I have no idea what they are."

"They're of you," Julia said, "they're of you, Jackson."

"But--"

"I have to dash, sorry, sweetie."

No wonder identity fraud was such a fast-growing crime. The chemist was as lax as the police, Jackson had no receipt, no proof that the photographs were his, yet they were handed over promptly to him when he said that "Julia Land" had dropped them off this morning. The chemist (a man) smiled at him in a knowing way and said, "Yes, of course," so Jackson presumed that Julia had used the full force of her orange-selling charms on him. If you were a man, you could be eighty with a Zimmer and Julia would flirt with you while she helped you across the road--because, and this was one of the reasons he loved her, she was the kind of person who walked old people across the roads, helped blind people in supermarkets, scooped up lost cats and injured birds.

She couldn't help the flirting, it came automatically to her as if it were embedded in her personality. Julia flirted with dogs, for heaven's sake. He had even seen her flirt with inanimate objects, cajoling a kettle into boiling faster, a car to start, a plant to flower.

"Oh, come on, sweetie, if you just try a little bit harder, you can do it."

Perhaps he should look on it as a social service rather than as a threat, send her out to old people's homes to give old guys the illusion of virility, make them feel good about themselves again. Vi-agra for the mind. There was something pathetic about old men. Guys who had fought in wars, witnessed empires topple, strode around boardrooms and factory floors like kings, won the bread, paid the dues, walked the walk, talked the talk, and now they couldn't even piss without help. Whereas old women, no matter how frail, never seemed as pitiful. Of course there weren't as many old men around as there were old women. Dry and brittle as old kindling maybe, but they were built to last.

He took the photos into Toast and settled into a booth. He felt an emotion similar to that of unwrapping a gift, the same anticipa-tion, the same surge of excitement, only on the dark side--the ob-verse, that was the fancy word for it, the word Julia would have used. The photograph would be welcome proof that he hadn't hallucinated his experience in the Forth, unfortunately it would also be unwelcome proof that someone, somewhere, was dead.

A waitress brought over his coffee, and when she was safely back behind the counter he opened the packet of glossy six-by-fours. They were printed in the order they had been in on the memory card--the first three were indeed of Jackson, taken in the snow in France on Christmas Day, Julia trying out her new camera. He looked much the same in all three, striking awkward poses, managing a half-smile in the last one after much coaxing on Julia's part. "Oh, come on, sweetie, if you just try a little bit harder, you can do it." He hated having his photograph taken.

Then there were a couple more of France and then nothing until Venice because Julia had accidentally left the camera behind when she returned to London after New Year's. She had packed in haste, typical Julia, and they had made love, a last-minute farewell thing, when she should already have been on the road to the air-port, let alone packing.

He dialed Louise's mobile number. The phone rang for a long time.

Venice still looked beautiful, but now rather than simply being holiday photographs, the little Canalettos looked like poignant images of halcyon days, a record of their golden age together as a couple. Just before the cracks appeared. "A couple? Is that how you think of us?"

When Louise Monroe called him "Jackson" yesterday ("Let's face it, Jackson, on paper you just don't look good"), it felt like a switch had been thrown, just that little buzz of an electrical current kicking in. Bad dog, Jackson. He had thought better of himself than that.

She was, let's face it, his type. Julia was so much not his type that she was off the radar. Louise. This was what happened when you went over to the dark side. When you became bad Jackson, you started to lust after other women. "Watch out for Pisceans," Julia had said. Was Louise Monroe a Piscean? She would be a new path. Not necessarily a good path or a better one, just a new one.

After several rings a male voice (posh Edinburgh) answered, "The Monroe residence, can I help you?" Jackson was caught off guard, he hadn't expected a man to answer, much less a pretentious-sounding wanker. He had expected better of Inspector Monroe. Before he could say anything, she came on the phone with a snappish, "Yes?"

"It's Jackson, Jackson Brodie," he said.

He had reached the last photograph of Venice. It was the view from their hotel window, over the lagoon, taken at the last moment by Julia ("Wait--we'll forget this view") before they boarded the Cipriani's launch to St. Mark's Square for the last time. She was right, he would have forgotten the view if there had been no record of it. But at the end of the day, no matter how beautiful, it was just a view. He could see what she meant about having people in pho-tographs, if she had been standing at the window with the lagoon behind her, it would have been a completely different photograph.

Then there was the photograph of him next to the One O'Clock Gun with the Japanese, then the photograph of the Na-tional War Memorial. There was only one more photograph after that. It was black, entirely black. Puzzled, Jackson rifled through the pictures again. Same result--nothing. No sign of the dead girl at all. Only the black photograph. He was reminded of the black square that Julia gazed into every night, the raging Arctic storm. He was wondering if the photograph of the dead girl had been erased, perhaps accidentally. He knew that you could never erase anything completely, it wasn't deleting a file that destroyed it, it was writing new data over it. There were programs designed for retrieving images. It would be easy enough for a camera shop to do. Or police forensics.

"Did you want something," Louise asked, "or did you just ring to annoy me?"

"You're not really a morning person, are you?" he said. He suddenly realized what had happened. In his hurry to take the pho-tograph--dead body, rising tide, and so on--he had left the lens cap on. Oh shit. He banged his head on the table. The other pa-trons of Toast looked at him in alarm.

"Hello? Calling Jackson."

"Nothing, I don't want anything. You're right, I was just ringing to annoy you." He remembered something, something the crazy Russian girl said to him last night, and he asked Louise what she knew about "Real Homes for Real People."

"Squirrels are eating my house," Louise Monroe said unexpect-edly.

"Okay," Jackson said slowly, unable to think of any kind of response to that statement. He wondered if they were particularly big squirrels.

Chapter 38

Louise was struck by an odd kind of terror, some vague memory of a documentary or a film--fact or fiction, she didn't know--a man waking up in a stupor and finding that his entire family had been butchered while he slept, stumbling from room to room and finding their bodies.

She woke up suddenly, too suddenly, tachycardiac and sweating, and it took several seconds before she was convinced it was a dream. That was when she heard the scrabbling. In the walls? Or above her head? Above her head. Claws or nails on wood, scratching, something running. It stopped. Started again, stopped again. She tried to imagine what was making the noise. Rodent Olympics in the attic. A couple of years ago she would have been able to put Jellybean up there, the feline terminator. Asleep on the bed, he shifted against her foot. She would have liked his professional opinion on the scratching, scrabbling things, but she didn't want to disturb him. He slept nearly the whole day and night now. She had begun to think in terms of last days, that this might be his last breakfast, his last wash, his last walk outside. She no longer bought him cat food, instead she went to Marks and Spencer's Food Hall and chose organic smoked salmon, slices of cooked chicken breast, and cartons of fresh custard, none of which he was able to take more than a few halfhearted mouthfuls of, more to please her, Louise suspected, than out of any real hunger. The last supper. Archie complained that he didn't get fed as well as the cat, and he was right.

She hauled herself out of bed and padded along the hall, where she opened the door to Archie's bedroom--she just needed to be completely sure that the nightmare had been a nightmare. Both boys were sprawled in sleep, Archie in his bed, Hamish in a sleeping bag on the floor. The room stank of boys. Louise imagined a girl's room would smell of nail varnish, pencils, cheap candy sweets. Archie's room was essence of testosterone and feet. In the gloom, she could just make out the rise and fall of Archie's breathing. She didn't bother examining Hamish for signs of life, boys like him should be culled as far as she was concerned.

Retrieving her heavy police-issue Maglite from under her pillow, she pulled down the Ramsay ladder from the trapdoor in the landing ceiling. She climbed up and lifted the trapdoor cautiously, imagining things jumping on her head and getting tangled in her hair, nibbling on her ears and lips.

The tiny attic skylight let in more of the morning than she'd expected, and extra illumination was provided through gaps in the slates. Louise was pretty sure there shouldn't be gaps between the slates. It wasn't really an attic, just a loft space that contained the water tank and had no flooring or power. An electric cable snaked across the floor instead of being snugged away in trunking, she could see that part of the outer plastic covering had been eaten through, exposing bare wires. The rafters and joists were rough and splintery, and there was no insulation. Louise wondered if it was illegal to build new houses without insulation. The loft seemed to underline the fact that the house had a permanently unfinished feel to it.

Something moved in the far corner, something small and nim-ble, a gray whisk of tail and then it was gone through a tiny hole where the roan pipe met the small overhang above the downstairs living room. A squirrel.

Louise swept her Maglite over the wall, she could see quite clearly now where the squirrel had made his getaway--a chink in the fabric of the house where a lump of cement must have fallen out, or (more likely, knowing Hatter Homes) had never been there in the first place. She ran the torch over the gable wall, an archae-ologist opening up a pharaoh's tomb, and frowned as she traced a crack that ziggurated down the mortar between the bricks. It didn't look like something you could blame on squirrels.

She made the awkward journey back through the trapdoor and down the ladder. As she reached the bottom rung, she nearly jumped out of her skin when a hand touched her bare arm. Hamish held out a mug of coffee to her, the image of a helpful but-ler, except that he was wearing nothing but a pair of boxers. Ad-vanced for his age. She was suddenly acutely aware of the shortness of the old T-shirt she had slept in. The little fucker had been looking up it the whole time she'd been climbing down the ladder.

"I put in milk but no sugar, Louise," he said. "I thought you looked like someone who watched her figure." She considered punching him, but she didn't want coffee all over the hall, or a lawsuit from his banker daddy, an arsehole whom Louise had met at a parents' evening. No coincidence that "banker" rhymed with "wanker."

"Thank you," she said and took the coffee from him. "You'd better get a move on, Hamish, you're going to be late for school." She emphasized the word "school," just to remind him that he was actually, technically, a child. She wanted to see a little scowl of hu-miliation on his smooth, bourgeois features, but instead he said, "Goodness, Louise, you really need to chill."

Louise pulled on shapeless sweats and went outside. She was still fuming at Hamish--now making breakfast in her kitchen, as comfortable as if he were in his own home. He made a surprisingly good cup of coffee, though. Archie had no idea how to make coffee unless it was instant. Louise wondered if Hamish made coffee for his own mother. It must be nice to have someone who did things for you. Perhaps in his own house he was as asocial and un-comfortable as Archie was at home, and perhaps, conversely, when he went to Hamish's house, Archie went around like Little Lord Fauntleroy, saying, "Can I get you more tea, Mrs. Sanders?" to Hamish's mother. No, that was a fantasy too far.

She stood on the pavement on the opposite side of the road, sipping her coffee while scrutinizing her house for flaws in the brickwork.

From somewhere inside the house, she could hear her mobile start to ring.

"That's quite a crack," a voice said. She turned and saw her next-door neighbor unlocking his car. He nodded his head in the direction of her front door and climbed into the driver's seat, his family piling in after him. Louise moved smartly away from where she'd been standing and, looking up, saw a fissure crowstepping its way down between the brickwork above the porch. "I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down." In the story, the Big Bad Wolf hadn't been able to blow down the house made of bricks, built by the sensible pig. Unfortunately, a sensible pig hadn't built Louise's house. Louise's house had been built by the Big Bad Wolf himself, Graham Hatter. What had Jessica said? "Subsidence or something."

"Fuck," she said.

The neighbor winced. He was some kind of Christian, he had one of those fish stickers on his car, and he obviously expected better of the police force. Weekday mornings he drove his children to school, Saturday morning to the swimming, Sunday morning to church. Mr. Straight Guy. The Vanilla Family. She hated them. "Fuck," she said to see him wince again. "Fuck, fuck, fuck." He drove off in a cloud of disapproval.

Hamish appeared at the front door, holding her phone aloft. "You have a gentleman caller," he said. He was very camp sometimes, so maybe he wasn't the salacious hetero he pretended to be. Would she be able to say to her colleagues at Corstorphine, "My son is gay"? Say it loud and say it proud. It was a conversation she just couldn't imagine somehow. Fourteen, she reminded herself, they were still children, they had no idea what or who they were. She crossed back over the road and snatched her mobile off Hamish.

"Yes?" Louise said sharply into the phone and then was sorry because it was Jackson Brodie, and then she was even more rude to him, punishing him for the fact that she had experienced a twitch of pleasure at the sound of his voice.

"I just wondered," he said, "if the words 'Real Homes for Real People' meant anything to you?"

"What?"

"Real homes for--"

"I heard you. You're not still sleuthing around, are you? 'Real Homes for Real People' is the slogan of Hatter Homes, their head-quarters are in Edinburgh, still a family business. Graham Hatter's a Scottish bigwig, millionaire businessman, et cetera. I live in a Hatter Home. It's a pile of shite. Squirrels are eating my house."

She had waited until Archie and Hamish were sprawled in the living room, watching MTV with their breakfast, oblivious to any-thing that wasn't their own stupid little world, and then she had sneaked into Archie's bedroom. She struck the space bar on the hi-bernating screen of his computer, and a page of text came up. She scrolled down and read, "You know, Bertie, you've got to remember the rich aren't like us."

"I know, miss.They've got more money." It was a story or a novel. Archie was writing a novel? When pigs flew. And if Archie wrote a novel it wouldn't be this kind of novel, it would involve the de-struction of the world by robotic cyber machines, with compliant sex-doll women thrown in for good measure. She went into "My Documents." The novel was on a CD. Definitely not Archie's, there was correspondence from an "Alex Blake," apparently replying to fan letters. Other correspondence with the same address from a Martin Canning. There was a part of a manuscript, a novel--several chapters of something called Death on the Black Isle. This was what Archie and Hamish had been reading out loud last night. "I think there's more to this than meets the eye, Bertie."

Then it had hit her--"Alex Blake" was the name of the guy whose house Richard Mott had been murdered in. Martin Canning was his real name--or was it the other way round? Her son, her harmless son, was in illegal possession of something that must have come from a murder scene. What else had they done? She felt something scooped out and hollow where her stomach used to be.

Chapter 39

Gloria had intended the early-morning blaze in the garden brazier to be symbolic, a pyre for the past Gloria (Graham's wife) and a signal for the future Gloria (Graham's widow). She had imagined herself emerging from the flames like a phoenix, so it was rather disappointing that her wardrobe hadn't made more of a show, even if it was only a couple of evening dresses--expensive designer things that she had worn for company dinner dances. Gloria had an uncomfortable vision of herself teetering into a succession of hotel ballrooms over the past thirty-nine years, mutton dressed as mutton, her body stuffed into the glittering carapace of a spangled dress, and her small feet ("pig's trotters," Graham called them) bound in unsuitable shoes.

Because he would soon be dead, she felt sure of it. Dead as a dodo. Dead as mutton. Dead as a doornail. Why a doornail? Why was a doornail deader than anything else? (The door itself, for example--equally dead, surely?) Did "dead" exist in the compara-tive? Could something be deader than something else? Dead, deader, deadest. Graham would be deader than Gloria. He would be superlatively dead. It had taken a lifetime for Gloria to realize how much she disliked Graham.

There was more smoke than fire, so she threw a firelighter into the brazier and watched the little tongues of green and blue flames as they began to lick at a rhinestone-encrusted bolero jacket by Jacques Vert. Mineral to mineral, dust to dust. The clothes hadn't reduced to the soft, powdery ash she had imagined.

The electronic gates opened and closed several times. If Gloria hadn't known that the man from the security company was down in the basement checking the system, she would have thought that a crowd of invisible people were being slowly filtered onto the property.

She watched a thrush pulling an elasticated worm from the lawn. Birds (apart from magpies) were Good Things. Even when they were killing other things. The birds ate the worms, the worms might soon be eating Graham. Graham had eaten birds (chicken, turkey, duck, pheasant, grouse, partridge), so the cycle of life would be complete. Since Graham's authoritarian regime was suspended unexpectedly, Gloria hadn't eaten anything that breathed. Graham always said he wanted to be burned, not buried, at the end, but Gloria thought it would be a shame to deprive all those small industrious creatures of a good meal.

Let the punishment fit the crime. She had attended a particu-larly rousing amateur production of The Mikado at the King's last year. She was very fond of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, at least the better-known ones. Some things were obvious--a man who kicked a dog to death, for example, should himself be kicked to death, preferably by dogs, but that wasn't really possible, the anatomy of a dog didn't lend itself to kicking. Which said a lot about dogs, if you thought about it. Gloria would be happy to undertake the kicking herself, if necessary. But as for Graham--what would be a suitable punishment for him?

Perhaps he should be forced to sit (or, better still, stand like a Victorian clerk) in an airless, windowless office all day, shuffling his way through endless sheaves of papers--insurance claims, VAT returns, tax returns, double accounting ledgers--all of which he would have to fill in accurately and truthfully by hand. Or, better still, he would have to stand all day and all night for the rest of time counting other people's money without ever being allowed to pocket so much as a farthing for himself. Gloria missed far-things, the littlest coin with the littlest bird on it.

She gave the brazier one last poke. Perhaps she should cremate Graham after all, just to make absolutely sure that he couldn't come back.

In the paper (she must cancel the newspapers, they weren't healthy) there was an article about a court case--a teenager had broken into an old people's home and stolen wallets and purses and watches from the rooms, and then he had taken an old woman's pet budgerigar from its cage, wrapped Sellotape round and round its body, and then thrown it out the window--five floors up. And this was civilization! How satisfying it would be to wind that teenager in Sellotape and throw him out a fifth-floor window. Was there no one meting out justice in this world? Were the yobs and the magpies and the Grahams and the kitten-eating men and the budgie-taping teenagers just going to get away with it?

Upstairs in her bedroom, Gloria pushed aside the black plastic bag of twenty-pound notes in her wardrobe and retrieved a little-worn red velour "leisure suit" that had been stuffed in the back of the wardrobe after only one outing because Graham had despised it at first sight, saying it made her look like a giant tomato. She regarded the image reflected back to her by the vast mirrors of the built-in wardrobes. A touch of the tomato, it was true, and it made her arse look enormous, but it covered her matronly bosom and iguana belly, and it was comfortable and rather jaunty, the sort of thing a sporty Mother Christmas might have worn. Graham had never liked her using words such as "arse," he said a woman should be "ladylike," like his own mother, Beryl, who, before she acquired her sponge-brain syndrome, had always referred to her rear end as her "derriere," possibly the only French word she knew.

"Arse, arse, arse," Gloria said to her mirrored behind. The red velour suit felt soft and snug, she imagined this was how babies felt in their clothes. She put on the trainers she had bought for her "Nifty Fifties" class, still more or less box-white and unsullied. As she made her way downstairs, she felt lighter on her feet, as if she were ready for something. Ready to run.

Gloria sighed. She could hear Graham's whiny secretary, Chris-tine Tennant, speaking to the answering machine again. "Graham, you're really needed here!" Gloria picked up the phone and said, "Christine, what can I do for you?" adopting the efficient tones of a woman who had worn heels and little business suits instead of slipping off a bar stool and following her prospective husband like a dog.

"The Fraud Unit has been here again," she said. "They want to question Graham. He's not really in Thurso, is he?" she added, sounding sad rather than bitter. "He's betrayed us all, hasn't he? He's run off and left everyone else to face the music."

"I don't know, Christine." She replaced the receiver. She almost felt sorry for Christine, all those years of faithful service and nothing to show for it. Perhaps she could send her flowers or a fruit basket. A fruit basket was a nice thing to receive.

The man from the security company emerged unexpectedly and molelike from the basement. "There's something wrong with the sensors on your gates," he announced, with more histrionics than seemed strictly necessary to Gloria. "I've got your screens back up, and your panic buttons, but I'll have to come back later with new parts. I don't know what's been going on down there."

He was a short man, with many of the character problems of short men, Gloria noticed. He drew himself up to his full pompous height and said, "You haven't let anyone suspicious in, have you?"

"Why would I let anyone suspicious in?" Gloria puzzled.

This didn't appear to be a satisfactory answer to him, and with a promise that he would be back later, he strutted his way down the garden path like a cock of the walk. A robin hopped along the path in the opposite direction, man and bird ignoring each other. The path was edged with borders of summer bedding plants--an-tirrhinums and salvias, neither of which were to Gloria's taste, but Bill had been an old-fashioned kind of gardener and she hadn't liked to request of him anything more avant-garde in the way of horticulture. If she were to stay in this house, she would plant archways of roses and honeysuckle. Row after row of sweet peas. But she wasn't staying.

The strong aroma of coffee hit Gloria's nostrils, and she followed its vapor trail, like an addicted Bisto Kid, back inside the house. It led her to the kitchen, where Tatiana was sitting at the table, smoking and reading the newspaper. She tapped the head-line (MASSIVE MANHUNT SPARKED BY MURDER OF FRINGE COMIC) with a painted fingernail and said, "Lot of bad people about."

Tatiana had slept and breakfasted in a serviceable pair of Gloria's pajamas but had now changed into something more sophisti-cated. She wore a pair of dainty shoes, "Marc Jacobs," she said, displaying her foot and admiring it, and was dressed in simple black trousers and a silk print top, "Prada," she said, stroking it. "Prada is truth," she added, blowing smoke up toward the ceiling. "I know many truths, Gloria."

"Really?" Gloria said. "You'd better be careful, then."

Gloria's heart had nearly stopped when Tatiana walked into the basement last night. "I thought you were dead," Gloria said to her, and Tatiana laughed and said, "Why would you think that? Front door isn't locked," she added. "Someone can kill you in your bed, Gloria."

"I'm not in my bed," Gloria said, following her up the stairs and into the kitchen, where she fumbled in a drawer for candles and matches. Before she could find either, the power came back on.

"It said in the newspaper that the police thought a girl who was wearing crucifix earrings might have drowned."

"Ah, yes,"Tatiana said. "Wasn't me."

"Who was it?"

"You didn't call me, Gloria,"Tatiana said, ignoring the question, her mouth making a little moue of disappointment.

"I didn't know I was supposed to."

"I gave you phone number."

Gloria had given her phone number to a lot of people in her time and never expected any of them to call her back. Tatiana started raking through cupboards looking for something to eat, and Gloria had sat her down and fixed them both toasted sand-wiches. When she finished her sandwich, Tatiana lit a cigarette and tore into a satsuma. Gloria had never seen anyone eat fruit and smoke at the same time. She made smoking look so enjoyable that Gloria wondered now why she had ever given it up. Something to do with pregnancy, but, really, had that been a good enough reason?

"Graham has a mistress," Gloria said.

"Ah, yes, Maggot," Tatiana said. "Voddabitch. He's going to leave you."

"Is it done yet, is it over? Have you got rid of Gloria? Have you got rid of the old bag?" Not planning to kill her but to leave her, which was a relief. "He should live so long," Gloria said.

Tatiana had lost interest in the conversation, she stretched and yawned and said, "I have to go to bed now," so Gloria had put her in Emily's old room, where she snored like a trooper most of the night before waking up and asking for bacon sandwiches "with pickles. You have pickles?"

"Just Branston," Gloria said.

It wasn't every day that a strange Russian dominatrix appeared out of nowhere and prowled around your house. Gloria followed Ta-tiana into the living room and watched her pick up and inspect several ornaments, the Moorcroft seemed to meet with her approval but not the Staffordshire figures, particularly the pair of 1850 creamers in the shape of a cow that she judged "vile." She inspected the fabric of the curtains, sniffed the flowers, tested the chairs for comfort. Gloria wondered if she howled at the full moon.

Tatiana proceeded to play with the Bang and Olufsen remote control, particularly taken with the button that turned the lights on and off, before stopping her pacing to scrutinize herself in the mirror. Then she picked an apple from the fruit bowl, and while she ate it (very loudly) she went through every station on the radio, pausing only to turn the volume up for Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On."And on and on and on. "This is great song," she said.

Gloria was fascinated. It was like being stuck in a cage with a restless and opinionated animal. Tatiana seemed utterly foreign in all ways. If you had sliced into her with a knife (although it was more likely to be the other way round), Gloria suspected she would have tasted of raw reindeer meat and smoky black tea and the iron tang of blood. Someone else's.

Finally, Tatiana threw herself on the sofa and blew air out of her mouth as if she were about to die of boredom. She scrutinized each of her fingernails in turn before giving Gloria a level gaze and saying, "Okay, Gloria. Shall we make a deal?"

Gloria had never made a deal in her life. She stood at the French windows and watched a huge wood pigeon, built like a cargo plane, waddling across the lawn. She turned back to look at Tatiana, another kind of wildlife, lying on the sofa and working her way through the channels on the television.

"A deal?" Gloria said. "What kind of a deal?"

Chapter 40

"Crime Writers for Lunch," as if they were going to be eaten by their audience. "Lunch" was coffee and filled white rolls, which were free and served from a bar at the back of the Spiegel-tent. And the writers were the entertainment. Dancing bears. They used to teach bears to dance by putting the cubs on hot coals. That was humanity for you. Martin had seen a bear--not a dancing one--in St. Petersburg. It had been with its owner, out for a walk on a lead, a brown bear as big as a big dog, on a small area of grass near the Neva. A couple of people were photographing it and then giving money to the man. Martin supposed that was why the man had the bear, to make money, everyone was trying to make money in St. Petersburg, teachers with no pensions selling books, gnarled old babushkas selling bits of knitting, girls selling their bodies.

The book event was being chaired by a gaunt woman whose credentials for chairing the event seemed vague, but in her intro-duction she claimed to be a "huge fan" of "genre writing," and, "What a wonderful privilege it was to have a group of such di-verse writers with us this lunchtime." Clap, clap, clap, hands raised high toward the three of them, a little geisha bow of obeisance.

Martin was sharing a platform with two other writers. One was an American woman by the name of E. M. Heller who was on a book tour, "trying to break into the British market," and who wrote violent, edgy books about serial killers. In person, Martin had expected her to be precise and severe, dressed in black with a hint of Harvard about her, but she turned out to be a slightly frowsy blonde from Alabama with yellow teeth and a general air of sloppiness. When she spoke she put her hand in front of her mouth, Martin thought it was because of her yellow teeth, but she turned to him and said, "I don't want to open my mouth, they'll all hate my accent," which came out more like "Ahdantwanopnma-marth, theyolol hayet maacksent." "No, they won't," Martin reassured her. But they did.

Their little trio was completed by Dougal Tarvit, who lived up north, on Nina Riley's patch, and who wrote "psychological thrillers" that were loosely based on real-life crimes. Martin had tried reading a couple but was put off by the fact that nothing really happened in them.

The Spiegeltent was full. Martin supposed the large audience was due to the economics of it--free food, and three writers for the price of one--but in the lull before they began, it slowly dawned on him that he was the subject of the attention. People were talking to one another about him, quite loudly in some cases, as if he weren't actu-ally present. He distinctly heard a tightly querulous Morningside voice say, "But I thought he was dead," in a way that implied that the female owner of the voice had been cheated by his live appearance.

E. M. Heller leaned across and said, "Hey, Alex, are you okay, honey?"

Martin reassured her that he was. "My real name's Martin," he added. What did E. M. Heller call herself, he wondered. Not "Em," surely?

"No." She laughed. "It stands for 'Elizabeth Mary'--two queens for the price of one, my mama used to say, but people call me 'Betty-May.' "

"Christ,"they both clearly heard Dougal Tarvit mutter, "it's like being trapped inside fucking Steel Magnolias."

Tarvit, slumped in his chair as if languor and bad posture were the marks of masculinity, seemed to hold his two fellow writers in contempt--E. M. Heller for being a woman and Martin for writing "populist shite," words that were actually thrown in Martin's direction in the course of what turned out to be a dismayingly quarrelsome sixty minutes. ("Well, the scalpels seem to be out today," the gaunt woman said, glancing nervously around as if marking possible exits from the Spiegeltent.)

"I thought this was just a reading," E. M. Heller whispered to Martin. "I didn't realize it was a debate."

"It's not supposed to be," he whispered back. Dougal Tarvit glared at them both. Martin regretted now that he had refused Melanie's offer to fly up. If nothing else, his agent was good for a scrap. Dougal Tarvit was all polemical bluster and would have been no match for Melanie. If slicing him with her tongue didn't work, she would have beaten him to death with her bare fists.

"He's just jealous," Betty-May whispered to Martin. "You being involved in a real-life murder and all."

"If you could each just read for ten minutes," the gaunt woman said to them before they began, "then there'll be time for lots of questions at the end."

The audience was predominantly middle-aged and female, as usual at these events, although Dougal Tarvit's scathing presence had attracted a younger, mostly male, element. Martin's typical au-dience was almost exclusively women who were older than he was. He looked for Jackson and saw him standing near the bar, straight backed with his hands in front as if he were going to stop a penalty shot. All he was missing was the black suit and the ear-piece to make him look like a presidential Secret Service agent. Jackson was standing very still, alert like an intelligent sheepdog, but his eyes roamed restlessly round the room. He had the reassuring demeanor of someone who knew what he was doing. Martin felt an absurd twinge of pride in Jackson's professionalism. He was the right stuff.

"Nothing's going to happen to you on my watch, Martin," Jackson said laconically. Martin thought people said that only in films.

Betty-May read first, too fast and too breathless. The poor woman was stopped three times, twice by members of the audi-ence asking her to "speak up" or "speak more clearly" and once by a mobile phone suddenly playing the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth.

Tarvit, on the other hand, hammed it up like an old pro. His reading introduced the element of dramatic tension to his books that Martin hadn't found on the flat page. He read for a long time, much longer than his allotted ten minutes, Martin glanced surreptitiously at his watch and found only naked wrist, he still wasn't accustomed to it not being there. What had Richard Mott felt in the last minutes and seconds left to him? It didn't bear thinking about. Why had the person who killed Richard Mott phoned him? Was he going to come back and kill him as well? Had he intended to kill him all along and only just realized that he got the wrong person?

Martin's stomach growled so loudly that he was sure everyone must have heard it. It was a bit much to have to sit there and watch other people eat, especially when he'd had nothing so far today. Betty-May pressed a mint into his hand and gave him an encour-aging yellow-toothed smile.

Tarvit had the audience in thrall so that when he finished there was a collective sigh of deflation as if they wanted him to carry on. Please,no, Martin thought. The gaunt woman came onto the plat-form again and said, "That was wonderful, Dougal, a pretty hard act to follow, but I'm sure Alex Blake will try to live up to the challenge." Thanks, Martin thought. "If you could cut it a bit short, Alex," she murmured to him.

When it came to question time, hands shot up everywhere. Young people, student types, ran around with microphones, and Martin braced himself for the usual questions (Do you write with a pen or a computer? Do you have a daily routine?). Of course, he had once been on the other side of the platform, asking just those questions of the writers he admired. "Mr. Faulks, who have been your literary influences?" I was that reader, Martin thought glumly. He was beginning to wish he had never crossed over.

But to his horror there were a barrage of questions aimed at Martin's newfound notoriety--"What does it feel like to be at the center of a real-life murder investigation?""Has it put your own work in perspective?" "Was it true that Richard Mott was decapitated?" The gaunt woman stepped in anxiously. "Perhaps these aren't appro-priate questions, and I really don't think we should be talking about what is, after all, an ongoing police investigation. Let's have some questions about the work, shall we? That's what we're here for, after all."All the questions about the work were for Betty-May and Tarvit, not for Martin, except for a stout and insistent woman who wanted to know whether his faith helped his "creativity" or was it the other way round? ("Hard to say," Martin said.)

The gaunt woman, Martin had no idea what her name was and now never would probably, clapped her hands and said, "Well, I'm sorry. That's all we have time for, it's been such a treat, but if you all want to make your way over to the signing tent, you will be able to buy copies of the books by our authors here and have them signed. So if you would just put your hands together, please . . ."

In the signing tent they sat at three identical tables. Every time an eager reader approached him, Martin felt a little knock of panic to his heart, imagining each newcomer reaching across the table as he signed his name and stabbing him with a knife, shooting him with a gun. Or, indeed, suddenly producing whatever weapon had been used to smash Richard Mott's skull and bringing it down on top of his own. Of course, most of them were ladies of a certain age, half of them were wearing tweed, for heaven's sake. Death Wore Tweed, Martin thought gloomily. It would be a good title for a Nina Riley book.

Jackson was standing behind him, in the same bodyguard pose as before, and after a while Martin began to relax into the rhythm of things. "And who shall I sign this to? To you? Or is it for someone else?""Is that a 'Clare'with an 'i'or without an 'i'?""To Pam,with all best wishes,Alex Blake.""And one for your friend Gloria? Certainly."

When the last of the queue had dribbled away and they were making their way back to the "authors' yurt," Betty-May Heller caught his sleeve and said, "How about a crime writer for lunch?" Martin couldn't help but notice the faint six o'clock shadow on her lip.

"I'm afraid he has to go," Jackson said, taking hold of Martin's elbow and steering him firmly away.

"Gosh," Martin heard Betty-May Heller murmur, "your publi-cist is so strict."

Chapter 41

Now this was what you call a murder inquiry. People who were busy, busy, busy. People with a real body and crime-scene photographs pinned up to prove it. A room humming with life because of a death. Louise studied the color photographs of Richard Mott's corpse pinned up in the major incident room at St. Leonard's. The police station at Howdenhall was too small to accommodate something this big. Louise had worked out of St. Leonard's when she was still in uniform. It was like going back to your old school. It felt familiar and alien at the same time.

"Nasty whack to the head, that," someone said behind her, making her jump. She turned round and found Colin Sutherland standing behind her, smiling for Scotland. If he was in The Bill, he'd be known as something like "Smiler Sutherland," but this being real life, he was usually referred to as "that tosser Sutherland."

"Were you looking for me?" he asked, a hopeful expression on his face.

Louise smiled back at him and said conversationally, "What's this guy Canning like? Is he a suspect?"

"Nah," Campbell said. "He's a funny little guy, bit of an old woman, if you ask me, but I doubt he's the killing kind."

"So," Louise said casually, "are you thinking burglary? Is any-thing missing from the house?"

"His phone, we think."

"Nothing else?"

"Not that we know of."

She could hardly be blatant and say, "No computer disks or any-thing like that?" Would they notice if a CD was missing? Probably not, but Martin Canning would know, wouldn't he?

"Where is he? Canning?"

"In a hotel, the Four Clans, I believe."

She wanted to say, "So you're not thinking two fourteen-year-old boys might have broken in and beaten the victim to death?" She gazed at a photograph of Richard Mott, he'd made a very messy corpse. Could her son be responsible for that? No, definitely not. Hamish maybe, but not her baby.

"You're very interested in this case, Louise. Do you want me to find room for you on the team? We've lost a couple of people to the 'flu.'We could bring you over from Corstorphine if you're not busy over there." He moved a step closer to her, and she moved a step back. Perfect rhythm, they'd be doing the fox-trot next.

"No, no, just idle curiosity, boss." Lies came easier than the truth. She pulled out a name from the past. "Actually I was looking for Bob Carstairs."

"Went upstairs a few months ago, Louise. Didn't you hear?"

"Upstairs?"

"To meet the big boss." The man was like a walking riddle. "Dead. Heart attack," Sutherland said with a huge grin. "One minute here, the next minute gone." He snapped his fingers like a magician. "Just like that."

Back at Corstorphine she went looking for Jeff Lennon and found him hiding away in a corner of the open-plan office, sitting at his desk, eating a bar of chocolate. Louise imagined him in retirement, lardy and bored. Or, more likely, on his way upstairs to meet the "big boss."

"Did you check the owner for that Honda, Jeff?"

Jeff took in a deep nose-breath as if he were in a yoga class. Louise had tried yoga, but she found herself wanting to yell at the teacher to get a move on. Now she wanted to yell at Jeff Lennon. "Certainly did," he said eventually. "I was just coming to find you."

He didn't look like a man who was planning on finding any-thing in a hurry.

"It's a business called Providence Holdings."

"Not Terence Smith, then?"What did that mean, that Jackson Brodie had been wrong (or lying) when he said that Honda Man had been involved in the road rage? Or was Honda Man driving someone else's car, someone he worked for? Providence Holdings. "Never heard of it," she said. "Does it mean anything to you?"

"No, but I did you a favor and looked it up in Companies House."

"And?"

"The director is one Graham Hatter."

"The Graham Hatter?"

"One and the same," Jeff said.

"So Honda Man--I mean Terence Smith--works for Graham Hatter?" And Jackson had been asking about "Real Homes for Real People" this morning. Making his bloody "connections" everywhere. What did he know that he wasn't telling her? With-holding evidence, that was an offense, for God's sake. What was wrong with the man?

"I handed the info on to the team investigating the road rage," Jeff Lennon said.

"It's a team?"

"Well, no, a couple of wee lassies."Ah, sexism, thy name is Jeff Lennon.

"You're a star, Jeff. I owe you one."

"Aye, you do," he said cheerfully. "How's that son of yours? Andy?"

"Archie. He's fine, thanks."

Chapter 42

Jackson worked hard at suppressing a yawn. The Spiegeltent was thick with overheated air. "Deconstructed romantic irony," said the ca-daverous woman who had introduced the writers on the platform, her words seemingly addressed to no one in particular. Jackson had no idea what she meant. She was wearing a low-cut top that revealed a bony sternum and breasts that hung like flaps. Someone give that woman a good meal, Jackson thought. Retaining an impassive expression on his face, he conjured up a picture of Julia's breasts, breasts he hadn't seen enough of recently. Louise Monroe had much smaller breasts, you didn't have to see her naked to know that. But she had them, there was no doubt about that. He mustn't think about Louise Monroe naked. He felt a stab of cuckold's guilt. Very, very bad dog.

And, he noticed, here were yet more people who didn't seem to have jobs to go to, how did the economy of the country not collapse? Who was actually working? The foreign and the dispossessed--girls named Marijut and Sophia. And computer geeks, thousands of spotty boys who never saw daylight, the suits in the financial district, a few orange sellers, and that was it. And the emergency services, of course, they never rested. He wondered how Julia's day was going. He checked his watch discreetly. Per-haps she was having lunch with someone. Acting wasn't real work, not by anyone's definition of the word.

Martin, who clearly should be lying down in a darkened room listening to soothing music, seemed hysterically insistent that he appear at the Book Festival today even though it seemed an un-necessary kind of engagement to Jackson. He already had to have a quiet word with a journalist who wanted to interview Martin. "Sub judice," Jackson said to the man, rather more menacingly than he'd intended. He really wasn't in the mood today to be messed around with.

A lot seemed to have happened to Martin since Tuesday. A lot had happened to Jackson as well, of course, but Martin was winning hands down in the having-a-bad-day stakes.

"My laptop disappeared after I threw it at the Honda driver," he said breathlessly when Jackson caught up with him at the Book Festival in Charlotte Square. He seemed slightly deranged. Of course, there was deranged and then there was deranged, Jackson wasn't sure he was up to the second kind, but Martin seemed lucid and articulate. Perhaps a little too articulate for Jackson's liking.

"I spent the night in a hotel with the Peugeot driver because the hospital was worried that he might be concussed. His name was Paul Bradley, only it turns out that it wasn't, because there's no such person. He doesn't exist. But of course he exists, you saw him, didn't you? He had a gun. It was a Welrod. But then I passed out because I think he drugged me and then he stole my wallet. I wouldn't mind, but I saved his life."

"A Welrod?" Jackson queried. How did Martin know about guns? About Welrods, for heaven's sake.

"And someone broke into my office, well not broke in, there was no sign of a break-in, but there was a sweet wrapper on the floor--"

"A sweet wrapper?"

"I don't eat sweets! And now it turns out that Paul Bradley doesn't even exist! And he was my alibi."

"Alibi?"

"For murder."

"Murder?" Jackson revised his opinion, maybe this was the second kind of deranged.

"A man was murdered in my house! Richard Mott, the come-dian, and then he phoned me."

"Whoa. Richard Mott was murdered in your house?"

"Yes. And then he phoned me."

"Yes, you said that." Could Martin tell the difference between fact and fiction? He was a writer, after all.

"Not him, I know it wasn't him. The murderer must have taken his phone--his phone was missing--and then he phoned me on it."

"Why?"

"I don't know!"

"Okay, okay, stay calm." Jackson sighed. You said five little words to someone--How can I help you?--and it was as if you'd mort-gaged your soul out to them.

Despite the fact that everything Martin said sounded out-landish, there were little anchors of truth in his story. And who was Jackson to criticize, after all? He had tried to save a dead girl from drowning, he had killed a dog with the power of his thoughts. Jackson wondered if Martin still lived with his mother. Not that there was anything wrong with that, Jackson would quite like to be living with his own mother, his time with her having been cut so short. No, Martin didn't live with his mother, he lived with Richard Mott, didn't he?

"Not lived," Martin corrected. "He was staying with me while he was up for the Festival. I hardly knew him, actually. I didn't even like him. What if his killer is coming after me next?"

"I think you need to talk to the police, Martin."

"No!"

"Give them your phone so they can try to trace the call."

"No!"

They were a contentious bunch. He had never heard of Dougal Tarvit, nor E. M. Heller. He'd never heard of Alex Blake, come to that, until yesterday evening. On his way over to the Book Festi-val, he had popped into a bookshop and leafed through one of "Alex Blake's" books in the coffee shop. It was innocuous stuff, depicting a kind of retro-utopian Britain that was rife with aristo-crats and gamekeepers--although no one seemed to have sex (which would fit with Martin's neutered demeanor). It was a non-sensical kind of setting where murders were tidy affairs that resulted in inoffensive corpses, the stuff of Sunday-evening television, the equivalent of a hot bath and a warm mug of cocoa. The serfs weren't revolting, they were positively happy in their chains, and the rank smell of death didn't corrupt the genteel, heather-scented air around Nina Riley's head. "'Don't go in there, Miss Riley,' the gillie said,'it's no' a sight for a bonny young lassie's eyes.'"

Nina Riley had a sidekick. Didn't they all? Robin to her Bat-man. "I've discovered something important, Bertie. I must see you." There was a guy named Burt who used to be his brother Francis's best friend. Both welders, both rugby players. Burt had broken down at Francis's funeral--it was the only thing Jackson could remember about his brother's funeral--Burt crying at the graveside, ugly masculine sobs, coughed up by a macho guy who probably hadn't cried since he was a baby. Francis had killed himself, in a brutal, casual way that Jackson now recognized as being typical of his brother. "You stupid fucking bastard, Francis!" Burt had shouted angrily to the coffin as it was lowered, before a couple of guys wrestled him away from the open maw of the grave. Francis had never been "Frank" or "Fran," he had always been called by his full name, it had lent him a certain dignity that he had possi-bly never really earned.

Jackson didn't remember his sister's funeral because he hadn't attended it, staying with a neighbor instead. Mrs. Judd. It was a long time since he'd thought about Mrs. Judd, the sooty smell of her back parlor with its overstuffed cut moquette, the gold eyetooth that gave her a slightly rakish, gypsy air although there had been nothing unconventional in a life that had been defined by the pit--daughter of a miner, wife of a miner, mother of a miner.

Jackson was all dressed, ready to go to Niamh's funeral, he could recall the black suit he was wearing, made from a cheap, felty ma-terial, he'd never seen it before and never saw it again, but when it came time to go, he simply couldn't, shaking his head mutely when his father said, "Best get going, son." Francis said gruffly, "Come on, Jackson, you'll be sorry if you don't come and say good-bye to her proper-like," but Jackson had never regretted not going to that terrible funeral. Francis was right, though, he had never properly said good-bye to Niamh.

He was twelve years old and had never worn a suit before, and it would be years before he wore one again--Francis's funeral hadn't merited one, apparently--and all he remembered about that day was wearing someone else's ill-fitting suit and sitting at Mrs. Judd's little kitchen table with its worn Formica, dotted with cigarette burns, and drinking sweet tea and eating a Birds Eye chicken pie. Funny the things you remembered. "Bertie, this was no accident, this was murder!"

He had expected someone to come up to him in the coffee shop and ask him with a sarcastic sneer if he was intending to buy the book or just sit there all day and read it for free, but then he realized that no one cared and he could indeed have sat there all day, with a sickly latte and an even more sickly blueberry muffin, and read Alex Blake's entire oeuvre without paying, if he so wished. Nobody worked and the books were free.

Jackson didn't read much fiction, never had, just the occasional spy or thriller thing on holiday. He preferred factual books, they gave him the feeling that he was learning something, even if he forgot it almost immediately. He wasn't really sure he saw the point of novels, he didn't go around saying that, because then people thought you were a philistine. Maybe he was a philistine. Julia was a great reader, she always had a novel on the go, but then her whole professional life was based on fictions of one kind or another, whereas his whole professional life had been based on fact.

He wasn't much better with art. All that fuzzy Impressionism didn't do it for him, he'd looked at endless water lilies and thought, What's the point? And religious paintings made him feel as if he were in a Catholic church. He liked representational art, pictures that told a story. He liked Vermeer, all those cool interi-ors spoke of an ordinariness he could relate to, a moment in time captured forever, because life wasn't about legions of Madonnas and water lilies, it was about the commonplace of details--the woman pouring milk from a jug, the boy sitting at the kitchen table, eating a chicken pie.

You could tell Tarvit was an arrogant prick, and E. M. Heller (what kind of a name was that?) was just plain odd, she was either a badly put-together woman or she was a man in drag. Trans-vestism was a mystery to Jackson, he had never in his life worn a single item of female clothing, apart from once borrowing a cash-mere scarf from Julia when they were going for a walk and being troubled all afternoon by its perfumed softness around his neck. Martin seemed blithely unaware of the signals that E. M. Heller was sending his way. The guy definitely had a look of celibacy about him, he reminded Jackson of a vicar or a monk. E. M.-- Eustacia Marguerite or Edward Malcolm? Whichever, E. M. was going to have her work cut out with Martin.

Jackson felt faintly ludicrous, standing like a Secret Service agent behind Martin in the "Signing Tent" (he had originally mis-read it as the "Singing Tent"--an idea that had both alarmed and confused him). The Book Festival was a jamboree of tents and reminded him vaguely of an army field camp. He had a sudden flashback to the smell of the big top last night, the familiar scent of grass under canvas. The crazy Russian girl like a bandit queen, with her knife at his throat.

Martin glanced up nervously as each new person approached him, as if he were waiting for an unknown assassin. Jackson didn't understand why he was doing the event if he was so worried. "I'm not going to hide away," Martin said. "You have to face the thing you're afraid of." In Jackson's experience it was often best to avoid the thing you were afraid of. Discretion really was sometimes the better part of valor.

"But at the same time you're worried that someone's after you? The person who stole Richard Mott's phone, the person who broke into your office?"

"No, that's not who's after me," Martin said. "Cosmic justice is after me."

"Cosmic justice?" Martin made it sound like a person, an out-rider for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

"I committed a crime," Martin said. "And now I must be punished. An eye for an eye."

Jackson tried to be encouraging. "Come on now, Martin, wasn't it Gandhi who said, 'An eye for an eye and the whole world will be blind'?"Something like that, anyway. He had seen it on a T-shirt once, at a CND demonstration he'd policed in the eighties. Last year Julia made him go on an antiwar march. That was how far his world had turned around.

"I'm sorry," Martin said. "It's very good of you to do this."

Jackson didn't mind, it had all the trappings of a job, and he was doing something rather than just hanging around (although it felt very like hanging around). Close-up and personal wasn't really his thing, but he had done bodyguard detail in his time, knew the drill.

"Nothing's going to happen to you on my watch, Martin," he reassured him. Moviespeak that seemed to make Martin happy.

Jackson wondered what "crime" Martin had committed. Parking in a bus bay? Writing crap novels?

Martin was doing well, politely signing and smiling. Jackson gave him a thumbs-up sign of encouragement. Then he turned around, and there she was, standing next to him.

"Jesus Christ," he muttered. "Would you not do that?"

He looked for the knife, just because he couldn't see it didn't mean that she didn't have it. In a previous life, under a previous regime, he expected she would have been a spy (or, indeed, an assassin). Maybe she still was.

"So, crazy Russian girl," he said, "how's it going?"

She ignored him and, without any preamble, handed him a photograph. The photograph showed a girl standing against a sea-wall somewhere. "Day trip to St. Andrews," the crazy Russian girl said. He couldn't keep on calling her that. She had said--what had she said? "Ask for Jojo." That sounded pretty unlikely. A working girl's name. "What's your real name?" he said to her. Real names had always seemed important to Jackson. "My name's Jackson Brodie."

She shrugged and said, "Tatiana. Is not secret."

"Tatiana?" Jackson wondered if that was like "Titania." He had seen production photographs of Julia playing the queen of the fairies in a drama-school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, barefoot, almost naked, her astonishing hair let loose and garlanded with flowers. A wild girl. He wished he had known her then.

"Yes, Tatiana."

"And the girl in the photograph?"

"Lena. She is twenty-five." It was sunny in the photograph and the wind was blowing the girl's hair around, tiny crucifixes just visible in her ears. His mermaid. She looked remarkably like Ta-tiana, except that her eyes were kinder. "Everyone says we look like sisters,"Tatiana said.

Tatiana had no grasp of the past tense, Jackson realized. It kept the dead girl in a present she no longer had a place in. He thought of all the other photographs of dead girls he had looked at in his time and felt the leaden weight of melancholy drop again. Josie had album after album of photographs documenting Marlee's existence from the moment of her birth. One day they would all be dust, or perhaps someone would find one in a flea market or a garage sale or whatever they would have in the future and feel the same sadness for an unknown, forgotten life. Tatiana nudged him in his bruised ribs with a sharp elbow and hissed, "Pay attention."

"What's with the crucifixes?" he asked.

"She bought them in jewelers, in St. James Center. Pair for her, pair for me--gift. She's religious. Good person. Meets bad peo-ple." She lit a cigarette and stared into the distance, as if she were looking at something that wasn't quite visible. "Very good person."

At the sight of the cigarette, a boy in a Book Festival T-shirt came running toward her. She stopped him at twenty paces with a look.

"I found her," Jackson said. "I found your friend Lena and then I lost her."

"I know." She took the photograph back from him.

"You told me last night to mind my own business," Jackson pointed out to her. "But now here you are."

"A girl can't change mind?"

"I take it that Terence Smith is trying to kill you because you know what happened to your friend Lena? Did he kill her?"

Tatiana threw the cigarette on the grass. The boy in the Book Festival T-shirt, still hovering just beyond the range of her petrifying gaze, darted forward and picked up the burning stub. He looked like the kind of boy who would throw himself on a grenade to stop it from killing other people.

"How did Terence Smith know my name?" Jackson asked.

"He works for bad people, bad people have ways. They have connections."

That sounded pretty vague to Jackson's ears. "How do I find him?"

"I tell you already," she said crossly. "Real Homes for Real Peo-ple." She leaned closer to him in that rather alarming way that she had, and fixed him with her green eyes. "You're very stupid, Mr. Brodie."

"Tell me about it. Did Terence Smith kill Lena?"

"Bye, bye," she said and waved her hand at him. He hadn't realized until then that it was possible to wave sarcastically. And then she was gone, slipping away into the eager book-loving crowd.

Jackson managed to wrestle Martin away from E. M. Heller's ambiguous clutches. "She prefers Betty-May," Martin confided in a whisper.

"Does she?" Jackson said. He was struck by a thought. "You don't have a car, do you, Martin?"

Martin's car was parked on the street outside his house where he had abandoned it the previous morning. Crime-scene tape was strung across the end of his driveway, and an assortment of police, uniform and plainclothes, could be glimpsed coming in and out of the house. Jackson wondered if he had been identified last night on the Meadows, it was unlikely but it still might be best to avoid the long arm of the law. Martin certainly seemed to feel the same, shielding his face like a common criminal with the property news-paper that Jackson had just picked up. If Martin really had been phoned by Richard Mott's killer, then he was withholding evi-dence, and by extension Jackson was now party to that. He sighed at the thought of how many charges he was stacking up.

He thought of Marijut in her pink uniform. "A maid, a friend, found a man who was murdered in a house we go to." And this was the house. Favors again. They seemed to spread their tentacles every-where that Jackson went. You say connection, I say connection. What did Martin know about them?

"Nice women," Martin said, "good cleaners. Wear pink."

"How did you pay them?"

"Cash in hand to the Housekeeper. I always leave them a tip."

"None of them ...how shall I put this, Martin? None of them ever offered extras?"

"Not really. But there was a nice girl named Anna who offered to defrost the 'fridge.' "

"Right. Shall I drive?" Jackson said, feeling suddenly perky at the idea. Martin's car was an uninspiring Vectra, but nonetheless it was four wheels and an engine.

"No, no, it's okay," Martin said politely, as if he were doing Jackson a favor, for God's sake, sliding into the driver's seat and turning on the engine. They set off in a series of kangaroo hops.

"Easy on the clutch there, Martin," Jackson murmured. He hadn't actually meant to say that out loud, nobody liked a back-seat (or, in this case, front seat) driver, or so his ex-wife had con-stantly informed him. Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them.

"Sorry," Martin said, nearly skinning a bicycle courier. Jackson considered wrestling the helm off Martin, but it was probably good for the guy to feel he was in control of something, however badly.

"Where are we going, by the way?" Martin asked.

"We're going to buy a house."

Chapter 43

"We're going to buy a house?"

"Well, we're going to look at houses," Jackson said, rifling through the property newspaper. "We're going to look at new de-velopments. Hatter Homes, you know them?"

"Real Homes for Real People. I looked at one but it was a bit shoddy. I don't really like new housing estates." He worried that Jackson might live in a new house on an estate and would be offended, but Jackson said, "Me neither. We're not really looking to buy," he added. Martin wondered if Jackson thought he was sim-ple. "We're just going to pretend. I'm looking for someone. Watch out for that bus, Martin, I think it's going to sideswipe you."

"Sorry."

"This is a lovely room, a real family room."The woman showing them round the "Braecroft" show home hesitated. Martin supposed that he and Jackson didn't look like a real family. The woman had a name badge that said MAGGIE and was dressed like a holiday rep in sky blue suit and multicolored cravat. Martin won-dered if he could get a name badge made--"William" or "Simon" or anything that wasn't Martin. It could be a very easy way to change your identity.

"Lovely," Jackson said in a deadpan kind of way. It was a north-facing room, all the light seemed to be funneled away from it. Martin felt an ache for his own home. Was he going to move back in when the police finished with it and spend the rest of his life living with the ghost of Richard Mott? Would he be able to sell it? Perhaps he could employ "Maggie," he imagined her showing prospective buyers around, saying brightly, "This is the living room, a lovely room, a real family room, and this is the spot where Richard Mott had his brains splattered."

"Of course, all sorts of people enjoy living in Hatter Homes," "Maggie" said, "not just families. And what is a family anyway?" She frowned as if she were giving serious thought to this question. She seemed tense and overwound.

They traipsed after her up the stairs. "Are you on a tight budget?" she inquired over her shoulder. "Because the 'Waverley' is more roomy and has a bigger garden, not that there's anything wrong with the 'Braecroft,' of course, it's an ingenious use of space."

"Deceptively small," Jackson muttered.

"And this is the master bedroom," "Maggie" announced proudly, "en suite, of course."

Martin sat down on the bed. He wanted to lie down and go to sleep, but he supposed that wasn't allowed.

"Well, thank you, Maggie," Jackson said, making his way back down the stairs, "you've certainly given us a lot to think about." She seemed to droop with disappointment, sensing a lost sale.

"Come into the Portakabin and I'll just take a note of your name," she said.

Outside the light seemed harsher. The estate was in a dip between two hills and had strange acoustics, you could hear the con-stant rumble of a motorway even though you could see no cars. A pot of dusty red geraniums sat next to the door of the Portakabin, the only sign of organic life. A JCB trundled past. The estate was still a building site even though half the houses were already occupied. There were some hard chairs in the Portakabin, and Mar

tin took a seat on one of them. He was so tired.

"And you are?" "Maggie" said to Jackson.

"David Lastingham," Jackson said promptly.

"And your partner?" she asked, looking at Martin.

"Alex Blake," Martin said wearily. It was his name, it belonged to him in a way that he suspected David Lastingham didn't belong to Jackson.

"And a contact phone number?" Jackson reeled off a number. Martin wondered if it was genuine.

"Oh, by the way," Jackson said casually to "Maggie," "I'm an old acquaintance of Terry Smith's from way back, you don't know where I can get hold of him, do you? It would be great to catch up."

A look of distaste passed across "Maggie's" face. "I've no idea where Terry is today." A mobile started to ring, and she dug into her handbag and said, "Excuse me a minute,"and went outside. To Martin's surprise Jackson leaped like a cat burglar over to the filing cabinet and started raking through it.

"I think that's illegal," Martin said.

"I think you're right."

"I thought you used to be a policeman."

"I did."

These were the kinds of circumstances that made Martin feel nervous, and he stood anxiously in the doorway and watched "Maggie" pacing around as she talked into her phone. She was having to raise her voice, apparently because of a poor signal, and stopped every few seconds to say, "Are you still there?" He heard her say, "He's in Thurso, apparently. I know, I don't believe it ei-ther. I think he's abandoned me, after all his promises." Her face seemed to collapse as she talked. She finished the call and dabbed at her eyes.

"She's coming back!" Martin hissed at Jackson.

By the time she walked back into the Portakabin, her mask firmly back in place, Jackson was engrossed in a brochure con-taining photographs of the various Hatter Homes on offer. "They're all so lovely," he said, "I don't see how I could possibly choose." He sighed and shook his head. He wasn't the least bit convincing. "Anyway," he said, turning to Martin, "back to the Batmobile, Robin."

"Here, I think," Martin said, drawing to a halt in front of a pair of electronic gates that stood wide-open. They were in the Grange, at an address that Jackson had apparently stolen from Maggie's filing cabinet. PROVIDENCE, a sign said on the gate.

"Who lives here?" Martin asked.

"Graham Hatter. Owner of Hatter Homes. He employs Ter-ence Smith, so I'm thinking that he might know his where-abouts."

"And who's Terence Smith?"

"It's a long story, Martin."

I've got time, Martin thought, but he didn't say it. Time was the only thing he did have, nanosecond after nanosecond ticking down. "I'll just stay here while you go in." He yawned. He won-dered if the Irn-Bru cocktail that the so-called Paul Bradley had given him had permanently affected his metabolism in some way. One minute he was so edgy he was twitching, the next he was so tired he couldn't keep his eyes open.

"Won't be long," Jackson said.

Martin looked through his glove compartment for something to read. All he could find was a wad of flyers for Richard's show-- miniature versions of his COMIC VIAGRA FOR THE MIND poster-- that he must have left in there on Tuesday.

He closed his eyes and was just falling into a sickly doze when he suddenly heard a familiar, unmistakable tune. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up like bristles. The Robin Hood theme song wafted in through the open car window. His heart bumped against his chest wall. Richard Mott's phone was ringing. In the street. Close by. Martin spun round looking for the source of the fugi-tive theme. A blue Honda had driven up and parked behind his own car. A blue Honda. A blue Honda? No, there were thousands of blue Hondas around, it wasn't necessarily the one that belonged to the insane baseball-bat-wielding driver. The theme to Robin Hood started up again. Martin opened the door and stumbled out of his car. There was no sign of anyone. Then he spotted him, walking up the driveway of the Hatters' house, the phone to his ear. It really was the Honda driver from Tuesday. The Honda driver had Richard Mott's phone. How could that be, unless he had killed Richard Mott? And why would he kill Richard Mott-- unless it was the Honda driver who had picked up his laptop, found his address, and come to Merchiston to kill Martin. Martin felt as if the blood had just left his body.

Martin was expecting him to ring the doorbell and announce himself in the usual way, but instead the Honda driver crossed the lawn and stood in front of the French windows. He finished his call and produced the baseball bat, again out of nowhere. He raised it high as if he were preparing to hit for the outfield, but instead he smashed it into the glass of the windows.

Chapter 44

This was the deal. When Celine Dion had sung her lungs out, when Tatiana had eaten her way through the fruit bowl, she reached into her bra, conjured out a Memory Stick, and said, "Do you know what this is, Gloria?"

"A Memory Stick, I believe," Gloria said.

"Whose Memory Stick, Gloria? Whose?"

"Yours?" Gloria hazarded, wondering if she was being subjected to some form of Slavic Socratic irony. "I know it's not mine," she added.

Tatiana handed her the Memory Stick and said, "No, it's ours, Gloria. You share with me, fifty-fifty."

"Share what?"

"Everything."

The Magus' book. Graham's secret accounts, all contained on one tiny tablet of plastic that Tatiana had taken from the pocket of Graham's summer-weight wool, as he lay flapping like a fish on his Apex bed.

"I thought you tried to resuscitate him," Gloria said thought-fully. Tatiana made a sad clown face. "Don't," Gloria said with a shudder.

There had been something on the radio this morning about horses. Someone had left dozens of horses locked up in a stable and gone away and all the horses had starved to death. Gloria thought about the big brown eyes of horses, she thought about Black Beauty, the saddest book ever written. She thought about all the horses with sad brown eyes you could help if you had a lot of money. The headless kittens, the Sellotaped budgies, the mangled boys.

"Hm," she said.

Gloria gazed thoughtfully at her screen saver of border collie puppies for a while and then tapped the space bar and brought her computer back to life. She typed in "Ozymandias" and, just like that, she entered into Graham's occult books.

"How did you know the password?" she asked Tatiana.

"I know everything." Gloria could think of a lot of things that Tatiana probably didn't know (how to make scones, the whereabouts of the Scilly Isles, the terror of aging) but didn't bother challenging her. She was oddly touched that Graham had used the title of the Shelley poem for his password. Perhaps he had, after all, appreciated the gift she had given him. Or perhaps he was just looking for the most obscure word he could find.

Graham's Memory Stick contained a lot of the humdrum of commerce--feasibility studies, projected figures, tight margins. The world seemed full of so many vague concepts, but you had to wonder--were these actually important? (Were they even real?) Shouldn't a person's life be based on simple, more tangible things--a bed of sweet peas staked in a garden border, a child on a swing, a certain slant of winter light. A basket of kittens.

There was a dismayingly large cache of e-mails that Graham had saved from Maggie Louden, little electronic billet-doux of the "My darling, what we have is so wonderful" type. Tatiana read, in a drawling vampiric accent that rendered the sentiments ludicrous, "Have you talked about the divorce with Gloria yet? You promised you would talk to her this weekend."

Attached to one of the e-mails was a folder of photographs, some of Graham and Maggie, although mostly of Maggie alone, taken by Graham, presumably. Gloria couldn't remember the last time that Graham had taken her photograph.

"Voddabitch," Gloria said.

He had taken Maggie to York Races for Ladies Day, an outing that Gloria herself had suggested to Graham as something they might do together, "a day out." Maggie and Graham had stayed at Middlethorpe Hall ("Really lovely, darling.You are a god"). He had bought her a pink diamond--"Gorgeous,gorgeous,gorgeous.It's huge! (Like you!) Someone's going to get a treat tonight!"

His e-mails to her tended to be more prosaic. "The new 'Ivan-hoe' is going to be a four-bedroom terrace, integral garage, we're trying to nail down sales before construction begins. Make a point of the laundry room. It's a big selling point." Everything was business, even love.

Gloria couldn't have a pink sink, but his mistress could have a pink diamond as big as the Balmoral. It seemed a shame now that Graham's imminent demise might rob Gloria of the satisfaction of watching him squirm in the divorce courts. Half his income, half his business.

"Half of nothing, Gloria," Tatiana said to her. "Remember, Proceeds of Crime Act 2002."

Somehow Gloria wasn't surprised that Tatiana was up to date with the criminal justice system.

"It's all there, Gloria,"Tatiana said, and she was right, it was-- the false accounting, the illegal bank transfers, the shell companies, the tax evasion. The money that Graham had passed through Hatter Homes' accounts, not just for himself but for other people-- the man was a money launderer for hire, washing and scrubbing away at the filthy lucre as if it were a vocation. There were codes and passwords for bank accounts in this country and in Jersey, in the Caymans, in Switzerland. The breadth and sprawl of it all was astounding. He owned the whole world.

"He owns Favors?" Gloria asked, squinting at the screen. "With Murdo?"

"Everything is business, Gloria. Business and lies. You're old woman, you should know that by now. Move," she commanded. Gloria shifted out of her seat, and Tatiana took over at the computer, her hands poised above the keyboard like those of a virtu-oso pianist about to commit the performance of her career.

Gloria was intrigued. "What exactly are you doing? Are you transferring money? Into the housekeeping account?" she added hopefully.

"If I tell you, I have to kill you," Tatiana said. She was like a comedy Russian. Gloria wondered if she really was Russian. There was no reason why she should be who she said she was. No rea-son why anyone should be who they said they were. People believed whatever they were told. They believed Graham was in Thurso. In the future, the future that was just beyond the path edged with antirrhinums and salvias, Gloria could be whoever she wanted to be.

Tatiana burst out laughing, slapped Gloria on the arm (quite hard), and said, "Just joking, Gloria. I'm moving it into one of the Swiss accounts. Take fraud cops forever to find it, long after other accounts are frozen, and by then you and me"--she snapped her fingers in the air--"pouf! We are gone."

"But how will we get the money out?" Gloria puzzled.

"Gloria, you are such idyot! It's Hatter Homes' account, you're director of company, you can take what you want out. You're im-portant businesswoman.You better phone them and tell them we're coming because this is lot of money. Don't worry, Gloria. remember, I work in bank."

The doorbell rang. It was Pam.

"This isn't really a good time," Gloria said.

"Your security gates are wide-open," Pam said, walking into the hallway. "Anyone could walk in. I'm just on my way back from the Book Festival." She made her way, without being invited, into the living room and sat on the peach-damask sofa. Gloria followed, wondering how to get rid of her, perhaps she could just snap her fingers and pouf!--she would be gone.

"I have to say, you didn't miss much," Pam said. "As events go it was very unsatisfactory, it managed to be both argumentative and lackluster at the same time. And I wasn't convinced by the filled rolls. Dougal Tarvit was all right, but as for Alex Blake, what a disappointment."

"Oh?"

"So short. Definitely something suspicious about him. I'm surprised the police don't have him in custody yet for Richard Mott's murder."

"Oh?"

"I bought you a signed copy."

"Oh?"

"Stop saying 'oh,' Gloria, you sound like a walking zero. Are you going to put the kettle on? I hear poor old Graham got stuck in Thurso."

The doorbell rang again. "Oh, for heaven's sake," Gloria said.

"Inspector Brodie," the man said, stepping forward and shaking her hand.

"An inspector calls," Gloria said. She presumed he was a fraud officer, but didn't they hunt in packs? He followed her into the living room. She wished she had kept him on the doorstep, like a Jehovah's Witness. All these unwanted visitors were an unwelcome distraction from the international banking fraud that Tatiana was committing in the kitchen, overseen by Gloria's red KitchenAid and Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course.

"Tea?" Gloria offered politely, trying to remember if he had shown her any ID. Where was his warrant card? He was saying something about road rage when Tatiana glided in from the kitchen and said, "Hello, everybody," like a poor actress in a farce.

"Oh," Pam said.

"We have to stop meeting like this," the policeman said to Ta-tiana. "People will begin to talk."

Whatever else might have been said after that was never spoken because Graham's golem chose that moment to put in the French windows with a baseball bat, and Pam started screaming as if she were trying to summon all the demons out of hell, and she didn't stop screaming until the stranger appeared in the garden and shot the golem in the heart.

Chapter 45

Jackson hadn't intended to impersonate a policeman, yet when the door was opened and he said, "Mrs. Hatter?" and she said, "Yes," it came out automatically. It had seemed the most natural thing in the world to say "Inspector Brodie."

Gloria Hatter was dressed in a red tracksuit that reminded him, in a distant pocket of his memory, of Jimmy Savile on Jim'll Fix It. Luckily she wasn't wearing a medallion or smoking a cigar. She seemed to think he was with the fraud squad, and he didn't go out of his way to disabuse her of this notion.

When he mentioned the Honda and the road-rage incident, she said, "I didn't see anything," and he said, "You were there as well?" in disbelief. A vaguely familiar woman with orange hair was sitting on the sofa, holding a copy of Martin's latest book, The Mon-key Puzzle Tree. That detail alone sent Jackson's brain spinning. Boxes within boxes, dolls within dolls, worlds within worlds. Everything was connected. Everything in the whole world.

The phone rang and an answering machine somewhere kicked in. A woman's hysterical voice that could have been announcing an alien invasion shouted, "Gloria! It's Christine! They're here.They're taking the computers!"

Jackson was distracted from this message by Tatiana's entrance. He thought, This is too much, it really is. When Honda Man, complete with baseball bat, appeared at the French windows like a character in a horror movie and created air where previously there had been glass, Jackson began to wonder if he was on some new kind of reality television show, a cross between Candid Camera and a murder-mystery weekend. He half-expected a presenter to leap out from behind the sofa in Gloria Hatter's living room and shout, "Surprise! Jackson Brodie, you thought you found a corpse in the River Forth, you thought you witnessed a man being assaulted with a baseball bat, you thought this little Russian lady here whispered clues in your ear (Yes! She doubled as that mysterious corpse), but no, it was all a fiction. Jackson Brodie, you are live in front of an audience of millions. Welcome to the future."

They were all here, Tatiana, Honda Man, the only person missing was Martin. But, lo, he had thought too soon because here came Martin, striding with more purpose than hitherto across Gloria Hatter's admirably well-kept lawns. "And also starring Martin Canning as the deceptively bumbling writer!"

Tatiana shouted something in Russian that sounded like a curse, while Gloria Hatter, less dramatically, said, "Terry, what on earth do you think you're doing?"

"He's gone!" he shouted at her. Spittle flew out of his mouth, reminding Jackson of his dog. "Mr. Hatter, he's done a runner. He's left me to carry the fucking can, hasn't he?" And then, with one easy motion, he swung body and bat and smashed a glass display cabinet that contained a host of animal ornaments. The man really liked the sound of breaking glass. He turned back to the room and hesitated for a moment, as if unsure what to choose next, time enough for Jackson to herd Gloria Hatter and her or-ange-haired friend behind the sofa (where there was no TV presenter, thank goodness).

Terence Smith seemed to notice Jackson for the first time, and a frown settled on his dumpy features. "You?" he puzzled. "Here? Why?"Then he spotted Tatiana. "And you as well?"He lifted the bat again and swung it in Tatiana's direction. Jackson made a dive for her, a rather inept rugby tackle, trying to bring her down and shield her with his body. Terence Smith caught him midair with a fierce smash at the waist so that Jackson folded in half as if he were hinged, and dropped to the carpet. A nice carpet, he noted, one of those thick Chinese ones with a pattern that looked as if it had been sculpted. He had a very close-up view of it. If he turned his head slightly, with great difficulty and much pain, he could also see Martin--still walking purposefully toward the house, his arm stretched straight in front of him as if he were leading a cavalry charge. At the end of the arm was his hand (as you would hope), and in his hand a gun. The Welrod. The Welrod that had puzzled Jackson when Martin mentioned it this morning.

Jackson thought, Well,okay. It was designed for covert close-up work but was still capable of being lethal at a distance, but only in the hands of someone who knew how to shoot because the sight on a Welrod was primitive. And you only got one shot because by the time you'd managed to reload you'd be either dead or arrested. And Martin was, let's face it, a bungler, he was bound to be a crap shot.

The sight of Martin was too much for Honda Man. The wheels in his brain seemed to grind to a halt, apparently from the effort of trying to work out why all the people he wanted to kill were in the same room together. Then he gave up on the whole thinking thing and turned his attention to Jackson. If he had to make a start somewhere, his expression seemed to imply, then it may as well be on the one already on the ground, groaning in agony. He raised the bat. Jackson rolled over into a fetal position and tried to protect his head with his hands. He wondered vaguely what the other people in the room were doing while he was waiting to have his skull broken open. Surely Tatiana could do something useful with her knife? And failing that she could rip open Terence Smith's throat with her teeth. She was doing neither, he could hear her on the phone, speaking in Russian very fast. He wondered what she was saying. Send lawyers, guns, and money? The woman with or-ange hair was screaming. She was doing the right thing. A lot of noise would bring the police. That would be good.

He was in a cocoon, isolated from the normal rules of time. His own personal end of days, counting every last lamb. He was back at home, the dimly lit kitchen of a small terraced house-- the past was always dimly lit in his memory, he wondered if it was because the poor used low-wattage lightbulbs--he was sitting at a table, his brother and sister on either side of him, his father newly scrubbed from the pit, his mother dishing up some kind of stew. His sister's lovely hair was in plaits ("pleats," his father called them), his brother's face was pale and open, he was wearing the same secondary-school uniform that Jackson would wear in a few years. Not Candid Camera but This Is Your Life. It was just a mo-ment, quite ordinary, the woman pouring milk from a jug. They ate their tea, their mother sat down when they'd finished and ate scraps. His brother hit him on the back of the head, and he rec-ognized it was Francis's way of being affectionate even though it hurt. His mother said something to him, but he couldn't catch what it was because something the size of a house fell on him at that moment. Jackson smelled blood and gunfire, the unmistak-able scents of the battlefield. All he'd heard was a tiny thuck kind of sound. You had to hand it to the Welrod, when they said "si-lenced" they meant silenced. It wasn't a house that had fallen on top of him, it was Terence Smith, felled like big game, and now crushing him to death. Jackson wondered if he could get a new rib cage when all this was over.

Grunting with the effort of it, he rolled the rhinoceros weight off and pulled himself up to a sitting position (great difficulty and much pain, etc.) and looked at his watch. It was an automatic reaction, an echo of other times, other places--Time of death... the suspect entered the premises at... the incident was logged at... a quarter to eight but high noon for Jackson. Julia's show was due to start in fifteen minutes. His whole day had piv-oted on that one appointment. "But you'll be finished in time for the show?" His watch, he noticed groggily, was spattered with blood.

Tatiana lit a casual cigarette and took Terence Smith's pulse.

"Is dead," she said, somewhat unnecessarily. He wasn't just dead, he was outstandingly dead, his heart ripped open by a bullet.

"Bull's-eye, Martin," Jackson murmured. Who would have thought Martin had it in him to be a crack shot? Tatiana came over to Jackson and knelt down next to him. She peered at him and said, "Okay?"

"In some ways."

"You save my life," she said.

"I think it was that guy over there that saved you," Jackson said. Martin was still standing on the lawn with the gun slack in his hand, aimed at the grass now. He seemed very calm, like someone who'd made peace with himself. Jackson heard a siren and thought, That was quick, but Gloria Hatter said, "Panic button," in a matter-of-fact way to no one in particular.

Tatiana leaned closer to Jackson. Her eyes had that dreamy look he remembered from the circus. She kissed him on the cheek and said, "Thank you." He felt strangely privileged, as if a wild animal had allowed him to stroke it.

Jackson didn't really care one way or the other that Terence Smith was dead. Maybe he'd seen too many dead people to get upset about another one, or maybe it was just that Honda Man was a bad piece of work and there wasn't enough room on the planet for the good people, let alone all the bad ones. There were starving people, tortured people, just plain poor people who could do with his oxygen. He wasn't the only one in the room to be un-perturbed by Terence Smith's passing. "Eye for an eye," Gloria Hatter said with magnificent indifference. The only person who seemed upset by what had happened was the woman with orange hair, who was whimpering quietly on the sofa.

Jackson heaved himself onto his feet and approached Martin cautiously. Close-up, he had a panicky, wild look in his eye. From past experience Jackson had found it best to treat panicky, wild-eyed guys like scared animals, they might be essentially harmless but they could still kick and bite.

"Stand easy, Martin," he said gently. "Come on, now, give me the gun." Martin handed the gun over without any hesitation. "Sorry,"he said. "Sorry about that."Then his knees gave way, and he collapsed in a sad little heap on the lawn so there was only Jack-son, Welrod in hand, standing over Terence Smith's dead body when the first officer on the scene arrived.

"This looks bad, doesn't it?" Jackson said.

Chapter 46

Louise turned in to the Hatter Homes' car park at their head-quarters on Queensferry Road. Some kind of flunky in a uniform came toward her to question her right to be there, and she slapped her warrant card against the windshield and nearly mowed him down. Real Homes for Real People. How had Jackson found out there was a connection between Hatter Homes and Terence Smith? She would bet her bottom dollar that he was on the hunt. Was there ever such a troublesome man?

She was single-handed. Both Jessica and Sandy Mathieson had succumbed to the "flu." Before she came here she had swung by the Four Clans, but there had been no sign of Martin Canning. The CD was hidden now, safely slipped inside an old Laura Nyro CD. She figured that was the last place anyone would look.

When she got inside, she found the Hatter Homes' offices were in chaos. She recognized a couple of guys from fraud. One of them said to her, "No sign of Hatter anywhere."

"Have you tried his house?" she asked, and the guy from fraud said, "Next on our list. The wife's the other director, she's in deep shit as well."

She went looking for the woman behind the man, Hatter's sec-retary ("Christine Tennant"), who immediately started whining, "I haven't done anything. I know nothing. I'm innocent." The lady was protesting a little too much, in Louise's opinion. She remembered the crack that was running down the middle of her house. If nothing else, Hatter was a rotten builder. There was a fruit basket on Christine Tennant's desk. Louise could read the card tied to it with a ribbon. It said, "Just a little token of apprecia-tion. Best wishes, Gloria Hatter."

"Terence Smith?" she asked Christine Tennant.

"What about him?"

"What does he do, exactly?"

"He's horrible."

"Maybe, but what does he do?"

The secretary shrugged and said, "I don't know exactly. Sometimes he drives Mr. Hatter or runs errands for him, does favors. Mr. Hatter's in Thurso at the moment, though. 'So they say,'" she added darkly.

"Can you give me Mr. Hatter's home address? I'd like to talk to his wife?"

Christine Tennant reeled off the address. In the Grange. Nice, Louise thought. She'd bet Gloria Hatter's house didn't have a crack in it.

On the way over to the Hatter house, Louise wondered if Archie had come straight home from school or if he were roaming around town, creating mayhem and mischief? Archie and Hamish ought to be tethered somewhere, some dark, quiet place where they could do no harm. Instead they'd be in shops, on buses, in the streets, laughing like imbeciles, howling like monkeys, getting into trouble. If he had a father, if he had a father like Jackson--or even a father like Sandy Mathieson--would he be different?

Her radio crackled into sudden life. "ZH to ZHC--personal-attack alarm at Providence House, Mortonhall Road.To any set that can attend, your call sign and location please." Louise didn't bother responding. She was already there. Somehow it seemed unlikely that it was a coincidence. What had Jackson said? "A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen."

"This looks bad, doesn't it?" Jackson said.

"Yes," she agreed, "but no doubt you've got an outlandish ex-planation."

"Not really. You got here fast."

"Coincidence. Looks like I missed the good stuff again." He was standing over Terence Smith's dead body with a gun in his hand, covered in blood. Her heart contracted uncomfortably. Was he injured?

"Are you hurt?"

"Yes, a lot, but I'm okay. I don't think it's my blood."There was a man sitting on the lawn mumbling something about taking vows, the next time she looked at him he seemed to have fallen asleep. There was a woman with peachy-colored hair that complemented the sofa she was sitting on who was having a mild fit of hysterics. "Mrs. Hatter?" Louise asked her, but she didn't respond.

"I don't know who she is,"Jackson said. Very helpful. "And the guy asleep on the grass is Martin Canning."

"The Martin Canning? The writer? The guy who lives with Richard Mott?" Oh, this was too weird. Weird piled on weird.

"You need to secure the crime scene," he said. "No, you know that, don't you? Of course, you're a detective inspector."

"You're so not in a position to be making jokes."

He wiped the prints off the gun and put it on the ground. Jesus, she didn't believe he'd just done that! She should cuff him and arrest him right there on the spot. He said, "The gun belongs to someone called Paul Bradley, but he doesn't exist." He looked around and asked, "Where are the other two?"

"What other two?"

"Mrs. Hatter and Tatiana."

"Tatiana?"

"Crazy Russian girl. They were here a minute ago. Look, I'd really like to stay and chat, but I have to go."

Now he was really having a laugh. "This is a murder scene. My career will be over if I let you go. At worst you're a suspect, at best you're a witness." She seemed to have been here before. One more time, Louise, a witness, a suspect, and a convicted felon.

"I know but I've got something important to do, really impor-tant."They both listened to the sound of a siren coming closer. He looked like a dog hearing a whistle. "I don't exist," he said. "You never saw me. Please. Do me just this one favor, Louise."

He was a justified sinner. Like Louise. Louise. Just the way he said her name . . . she gave her head a shake, tried to dislodge him from her brain.

He went out the back door at the same time as Jim Tucker strode up the front drive. She was going over in her mind how she would present this to Jim. Was she really going to erase Jackson from the picture? Neither of the other two "witnesses" looked as if they had the foggiest idea what was going on. Through the now nonexistent French windows, she motioned Jim Tucker to go to the front door.

"Louise," he said, "I didn't know you were already at the locus."

She could see a DC and two uniformed policewomen at the gate, advancing up the path. And then her phone rang and her world tilted. Archie. "I'll be right there," she said to him.

"Archie," she said to Jim. "I have to go." He winced, sensing the mess he was about to inherit from her. She tried to make it sound better, which was pretty difficult under the circumstances. "Look, Jim, I just walked in on this a second ago, I know no more than you do, to all intents and purposes you're the first officer on the scene, but I have to go."The DC and the two constables were approaching the French windows but changed direction toward the front door when they realized they might be about to contaminate a crime scene. One of the policewomen peeled away and approached Martin Canning. Louise heard her say, "Mr. Canning? Martin? Are you all right? It's PC Clare Deponio, do you remember me?"

She could hear more sirens, one an ambulance. Louise could taste blood from where she had been biting her lip. She didn't say "Remember the favor you owe me, Jim." She didn't say "How's your lovely daughter doing at university? Bet she's glad she didn't get a drug rap." She didn't need to, he knew it was payback time, as you sow so shall you reap. He nodded his head toward the back of the house without saying anything. "Thanks," she mouthed at him and disappeared. She wondered how many disciplinary, possibly criminal, acts she'd committed within the last five minutes. She didn't bother to count.

Archie had sounded odd on the phone--strained and slightly desperate--and she thought he must have been arrested or killed someone. But it was worse than that.

Chapter 47

Then he and Irina were walking into his cockroach hotel, past the rather frightening men who hung around at the entrance. A cross between doormen and security staff, they were always dressed in black leather jackets, always smoking cigarettes. They opened doors (sometimes) and called taxis, but they seemed more like gangsters. One of them said something to Irina, and she waved him away with a dismissive gesture.

And then somehow they were in his room, and without knowing how, he was standing in front of her in his underpants saying, "Well-upholstered. Built for comfort, not for speed."

Then time jumped forward again, and she was astride him on the narrow bed, wearing only a bra and shoes, making short yipping noises that might have suggested sexual frenzy if her face hadn't remained a blank. Martin contributed hardly anything to the encounter, it had taken him by surprise in its unexpectedness and its haste. He climaxed quickly and quietly in a way that ashamed him. "Sorry," he said, and she shrugged and leaned over him, her beautiful hair sweeping his chest, a teasing gesture that seemed entirely perfunctory. He saw the dark roots where the bleach had grown out.

She climbed off him. The fog of alcohol in his brain cleared a little, and in its place a nauseous, dull depression fell on him as he watched her lighting a cigarette. A woman in a foreign country, a woman you hardly knew, did not strip down to her bra and shoes and ride you like a horse for free. She might not be a prostitute as such, but she expected money.

She picked up her clothes and put them on, the cigarette dan-gling from her mouth. She caught him looking at her and smiled. "Okay?"she said. "You have good time? You want to give me little gift for good time?"

He got up and hopped around, trying to get his trousers back on. The evening had taken him to depths of indignity he had previously steered clear of, even in his imagination. He searched through his pockets for money. He had cleared out most of his cash in the Grand Hotel and could find only a twenty-ruble note and small coins. Irina looked in disgust at the money as he tried to explain to her that he could go down to the reception desk and draw money on his Visa. She frowned and said, "Nyet, no Wisa."

"No, no," he said, "I'm not offering you Visa. I will change. I will get dollars for you from downstairs." She shook her head vig-orously. Then she pointed at his Rolex and asked, "Is good?" She was wrapping the scarf around her head again, buttoning up her coat.

"Yes," he said, "it's genuine, but--"

"You give to me." She was beginning to sound shrill and un-compromising. It was four in the morning (he had no idea how that had happened, when he last noticed the time it was eleven o'clock). There was a retired couple from Gravesend in the room next door. What would they think if they were woken up by a Russian woman demanding payment for sex? What if she started to scream and throw things around? It was ridiculous, the watch was worth more than ten thousand pounds, hardly a fair exchange. "No, I'll get money," he insisted. "And then the hotel will call a taxi for you." He imagined one of the menacing men in black leather putting her in a taxi, looking at Martin, knowing he'd just paid for sex with her.

She said something in Russian and made a move toward him, trying to grab his wrist. "No," he said, dancing out of the way. She made another lunge and he stepped away again, but this time she tripped and lost her balance and although she put out her hands to save herself, she couldn't stop her head hitting a glancing blow off the corner of the cheap veneer desk unit that occupied almost the whole of one wall in the small room. She gave a little cry, a wounded bird, and then was quiet.

She should have got up. She should have got up, clutching her forehead. There would be a cut or a bruise and it would be sore. He would probably take the Rolex off his wrist and give it to her to make up for the pain, to stop her from making a fuss. But she didn't get up. He crouched down and touched her on the shoul-der and said, "Irina?" tentatively. "Did you hurt yourself, are you okay?" She was lying facedown on the nasty carpet and didn't respond. Her scarf had slipped off and strands of blond hair had es-caped from the neat chignon that she had pinned her hair into. The back of her neck was pale and vulnerable.

He tried to roll her over, not sure if that was the right thing to do to someone who had knocked herself out. She was heavy, much heavier than he'd expected, and awkwardly resistant, as if she were determined to give him no help in his maneuvers. He managed to turn her, and she flopped onto her back. Her eyes were wide-open, staring at nothing. The shock made his heart stop for a second. He sprang away from her, falling over the end of the bed, banging his shin, hurting his foot. Something rose in his chest, a sob, a howl, he wasn't sure how it was going to emerge and was surprised it was nothing more than a stupid little squawk.

There was no obvious reason for it. A red mark on her temple, that was all. One of those chances in a million, he supposed--a fracture to one of her cervical vertebrae or an intracranial bleed. He read up on head injuries for months afterward.

The littlest thing. If she hadn't been wearing heels, if the carpet hadn't been fraying, if he had had the sense to realize that no way in the world would a girl like that be interested in him for himself. For a second he saw this scene through the eyes of others--the hotel management, the men in black leather, the police, the British consul, the couple from Gravesend, the dying grocer. There was no way that any of them would interpret it in a way that favored him.

Panic kicked in. Panic throbbing in his chest, spinning through his brain like a cyclone, a wave of adrenaline that passed through his body and washed away every thought except one--Get rid of her. He glanced around the room to see what of herself she had left behind. The only thing he could see was her handbag. He ri-fled through it to make sure there was nothing to incriminate him, that she hadn't written his name and hotel address down. Nothing, just a cheap purse, some keys, a tissue, and lipstick. A photograph in a plastic wallet. The photograph was of a baby, its sex indeterminate. Martin refused to think about the significance of a photograph of a baby.

He yanked the window open. He was on the seventh floor, but the windows opened all the way--no health and safety in the cockroach hotel. He dragged her over to the window, and then, holding her round the waist in a clumsy embrace like a poor dancer, he hauled her across the sill. He hated her for the way she was like an unwieldy puppet, a sandbag mannequin for bayonet practice. He hated her for the way she hung half-in, half-out of the room as if she didn't care about anything anymore. The street was deathly silent. If she fell from the seventh floor, if she was found on the pavement, no one would know whether she had jumped or been pushed, or simply fallen in drunken confusion. Her blood must be almost 100 percent alcohol, the amount she had drunk. No one would be able to point up to his window and say, "There, Martin Canning, British tourist, that was whose window she came out of." There was an enormous builders' dumpster down below, nearly full of rubble. He didn't want her to fall into that because then it might seem as if someone were trying to dispose of her body rather than her having simply fallen.

He put the strap of her bag around her neck and then pushed her arm through it, like a child's satchel, then he grabbed her round the knees and heaved and shoved until she slipped away.

If he had aimed for the construction dumpster he would have missed it, but because he wanted her to hit the pavement she went straight into the skip, twisting round in the air before crashing faceup onto the wood and stone and broken plaster inside it with a kind of crunching noise. A stray dog swerved from its path in alarm, but apart from that the street remained unmoved. He closed the window.

He sat on the floor in the corner of the room and hugged his knees. He stayed in that position for a long time, too drained to do anything else. He watched dawn entering the room and thought about Irina's sightless eyes, never seeing the light come. A cockroach ran across his foot. He heard the first tram taking to the street. He waited for the builders, imagined them climbing up the scaffold, looking down and seeing the woman lying like a discarded doll. He wondered if he would hear their cries of discovery from his room.

He heard a massive engine, gears grinding, and crawled over to the window. The dumpster was swinging in midair, like a child's toy from this distance. Somehow he had hoped that in the inter-vening hours she might have disappeared, but she was still there, broken and limp. The dumpster was swung onto the back of the enormous pickup lorry and settled with a great metallic clunk that echoed through the cold air. The lorry drove away, Martin followed its progress along the road, watching it move slowly, turning onto a bridge over the Neva. At the end of the bridge it turned and disappeared from sight.

He had thrown a human being away like rubbish.

At the airport, going through passport control, he waited for one of the terrifying officials to put a hand on his chest and feel his racing heart, to stare him in the eyes and see his guilt. But he was waved through with a sullen gesture. He had thought retribution would be swift, but it turned out that justice was going to be measured out slowly, rolling him flat until he simply didn't exist.

In a small duty-free shop, he bought a fridge magnet for his mother, a little varnished wooden matryoshka. On the flight home the grocer sat with the couple from Gravesend, squeezed into a seat that was too small for him, and told them that he had ticked off another item from his to-do-before-I-die list. The in-flight meal was served, a sorry concoction of congealed pasta. Martin wondered if Irina's stall remained boarded up or if someone had already taken it over. The grocer took ill as they came in to land. An ambulance collected him on the tarmac. Martin didn't even look.

There was a woman he recognized from the book signing earlier in the day. He had no idea why she was here. She was clutching a copy of The Monkey Puzzle Tree and screaming. He thought about making a joke, saying to her, "It's not that bad, is it?" but he didn't. There was a blond girl who shouted something in Russian at the crazy Honda driver. The Honda driver was going to kill the blond Russian girl, and then Jackson stepped in to save her, to sacrifice himself. The Honda driver was engorged with rage. There was something wrong with the minds of people like that, people who threw dogs through windows and stuck guns to their wives' heads. Bad brain chemistry. If Nina Riley had been here, she would have said, "Lay down your weapon, you dastardly scoundrel." But she wasn't here. It was just Martin.

Time slowed down. The Honda driver raised the bat in the familiar arc of annihilation. The Russian girl turned to face him. Her features changed. Her blue-doll eyes stared at him unblinking, her little rosebud lips said, "Shoot him, Marty." So he did.

Chapter 48

Apregnancy-testing kit.

Jackson had run (literally) back to the flat, dropped his blood-stained clothes on the bathroom floor, jumped in the shower, and washed awayTerence Smith from his life. For a mad second he had contemplated running all the way from the Hatter house to Julia's venue, but he could see that it might look a little too dramatic to arrive covered in blood. Save it for Macbeth.

He had been multitasking (as they said), pulling on clothes, phoning for a taxi, regarding his harrowed face in the steamy mirror, when he happened to glance down and see it.

He plucked the pregnancy test out of the wastebasket and stared at it as if it were an object from the moon. It was the last thing he was expecting to find, and yet why not? It had never happened in the two years they were together, but here it was. Blue. It was blue. Everyone knew what that meant. It explained everything, her mood swings, her loss of appetite (for sex and food), her odd diffidence. Julia was pregnant! What an extraordinary idea--Julia was having a baby. His baby. We're having a baby. A baby for Julia. There were a lot of different ways of saying it, but it all came down to the same thing, there was a microscopic new life inside Julia, a small creature nestling inside a burrow inside the woman he loved. He wondered if it was a boy. Wouldn't that be something, to have a son, to be the father his own father never was. He still had the little peanut baby doll in his pocket, he shrugged his jacket on and felt for it, like a talisman, a rosary bead, turning it over and over in his hand.

A baby would heal Julia. The lost Olivia would somehow be re-born in Julia's own baby. A baby would make everything right for Julia, and for the two of them. A couple. If they were going to be parents, then one way or another she was going to have to come to terms with that word. A baby would heal Jackson too, close up some of his wounds. What had Louise said? "Sperm meets egg and bam. It can happen to the best of us." And it had happened to Julia.

Not a new path, but a new world to walk in.

Chapter 49

Louise could hear classical music playing in the living room. The house lights were off and instead a scented candle was burning in the hearth. He had put Classic FM on the radio. Her heart broke for the way he had tried to deal with everything. She could see the back of Archie's head above the sofa. Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts, shut not up thy merciful ears to our prayers. She must have made a noise because he turned his head slightly and said, "Mum?" She could hear the tearful tremor in his voice.

"Archie?" She approached the sofa slowly. She bit down hard on her lip to try to stop the howl that was trying to escape from some deep, deep place inside. Archie looked up at her and said quietly, "I'm sorry, Mum." His eyes were rimmed with red, he looked ghastly. In his arms he was cradling Jellybean as if he were a newborn baby, but he was deflated and shrunk, the life all gone from him. He was wrapped in an old sweater of Louise's. "I thought he'd like to smell you," Archie said. Another turn of the corkscrew. Her heart in shreds. "It's okay to cry, Mum," he said, and the pain finally forced its way out--a terrible wail of lamen-tation, a high-pitched keening that sounded as if it belonged to someone else.

She hadn't been present at her cat's birth, and now she had missed his death. "But you had everything in between," Archie said. It was disturbing how like an adult he sounded. "Here," he said, carefully passing his sad, swaddled bundle over to her. "I'll make a cup of tea."

She unwrapped the cat and kissed him on the head, the ears, the paws. Even this shall pass.

When Archie came back with the tea it was sweet, he must have heard it somewhere on television, hot, sweet tea in times of crisis. She had never taken sugar in tea in her life, but there was something unexpectedly comforting about it.

"He had a good life," Archie said. He wasn't old enough for it to be a cliche to him.

"I know." Love was the hardest thing. Don't let anyone ever tell you different.

Chapter 50

"We have to leave, Gloria,"Tatiana said.

The machines continued to hiss and pump, Graham continued to float in space. Gloria bent down and kissed Graham on the forehead. A benediction or a curse, or both, because everything could be encompassed in the synthesis that was reality. Black and white, good and bad. His flesh already felt like clay.

What were the true crimes? Capitalism, religion, sex? Mur-der--usually, but not necessarily. Theft--ditto. But cruelty and indifference were also crimes. As were bad manners and callousness. Worst of all was indifference.

Not long after Gloria married Graham, they went to his par-ents'--Beryl and Jock's--for Sunday lunch. A skinny roast duck, as Gloria remembered, counterbalanced by a hefty plum cobbler. It never ceased to amaze Gloria that she could barely remember what happened last Friday but could recall in detail meals that she had eaten forty and more years ago.

For some reason their car was in the garage that day (Graham had brought a Triumph Herald to the marriage), so Graham's father had given them a lift to the modest "Hatter Home" (the old "Pencaitland" model, long abandoned) that had been a wedding gift from Jock and Beryl. It had been known as a "starter home." No one sold "finisher homes," did they?

On the way, they made a detour via "the yard" on some busi-ness or other that father and son had to attend to, long forgotten now. At the time Hatter Homes was just a builders' yard with a ramshackle office in one corner. Gloria got out of the car, she'd never been to the yard or the office before and supposed she should take an interest now that she herself was a Hatter. She should never have given up her maiden name of Lewis, of course. Now might be a good time to revert it, now that she was an out-law widow. People changed their identities all the time, her own grandfather had changed his name to Lewis after he arrived in Leeds from Poland with nothing more than a cardboard suitcase and a surname that no one could pronounce.

The two Hatter men went into the office, and Gloria wandered around the yard with its mysterious pallets and sacks. She couldn't imagine how you even began to build a house, she wondered what would have happened to the human race if it had all been up to her at the point when man first struck flint on flint and made a tool. She would never have managed anything as sophisticated as a shelf, everything would now be kept in hammocks and bags, probably. She was a gatherer, Graham was a screwdriver-wielding hunter. He would go out and build things, and she would stay inside and rear things. This was only a month after their wedding, when the sparkle was still on their union and Gloria was deliri-ously busy with buying matching tea plates and squeegee mops.

At that moment Gloria heard a little mewling noise that proved, when investigated, to be--joy of joys--a nest of kittens, still blind and molelike, curled up with their mother in a corner of the yard behind a pile of old wood.

Hatters, senior and junior, emerged from the office, her new father-in-law hailing her with "You found those damn kittens then, Gloria?" Gloria, who was already planning the sheepskin-lined basket she would provide for at least two, possibly all, of the kittens, a Hatter home within a Hatter Home, said, "Oh, they're so gorgeous, Mr. Hatter." Gloria's toes wriggled with the cuteness of the kittens. She still couldn't manage the familiarity of "Jock" and in fact never did for the three years she was his daughter-in-law, before he had a massive heart attack, dropping dead on-site into the mud in the breeze-block shell of one of his houses while his men gathered around and stared down at his lifeless body in as-tonishment. The titan had left the building. The Olympian, mean-while, was in the unfinished kitchen, wondering if he could get away with putting in a smaller window.

"Graham," Jock Hatter said, "get the bloody things, will you?"

"Sure," Graham said, scooping up all five soft, warm kitten bodies and in one easy movement plunging them into a water butt that stood next to the office. Gloria was so surprised that for a terrible second she merely watched, mute and motionless, as if she were under a spell. Then she screamed and made to run to Graham to res-cue the kittens, but "Jock" held her back. He was a small man but astonishingly strong, and no matter how much she twisted and turned to get away from him, she couldn't escape his grip. "Has to be done, lass," he said softly when she finally gave up. "It's just the way of the world." Graham removed the five limp little bodies from the water butt and threw them into an old oil drum that was used for waste.

"Fucking cats," he said when she became hysterical with him later in the galley kitchen of their starter home. "You need to stop being so fucking soft, Gloria. They're just fucking animals."

"Murdered." The word had sounded strange falling from Ta-tiana's lips, it rolled around like thunder, it cracked the sky. Glo-ria wondered if the cracked sky was going to break into pieces and fall at her feet. Her stomach felt hot and liquid, and her heart was beating faster than was healthy in a woman on the verge of a bus pass. Tatiana's friend had been murdered. Lena. A good person.

Gloria knew what Tatiana was going to say.And the worst thing was that she had believed it even before the name was said, so she said it first.

"Graham," she said flatly.

"Yes," Tatiana agreed. "Graham. He is very bad man. He told Terry to kill her. Same thing as killing her himself. No difference."

"No," Gloria agreed. "No difference. No difference at all."

"Lena was going to cops, tell everything she knew."

"What did she know? About the fraud?"

Tatiana laughed. "Fraud is nothing, Gloria. Many worse things than fraud. Graham's in business with very, very bad men. You don't want to know, they come after you. We really have to go now."

Gloria leaned closer to her husband and whispered in his ear,

"Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair."

They had left the scene of a murder. They were making a real get-away. Gloria was breaking rules, although not her own. She had rescued the black plastic bag of cash and the Memory Stick, but other than that they were fleeing in the clothes they stood up in. Tatiana had made a phone call, and a big black car had driven up to the back door and they had stepped in it. It was, if Gloria wasn't mistaken, the same car that had picked Tatiana up from the hospital after Graham's heart attack. The driver remained mute throughout their journey, and Gloria didn't ask who the black car belonged to. Big black cars with blacked-out windows tended to belong to bad people.

They were driving south, toward the airport, but Gloria had requested "a little detour."

"Why?"Tatiana asked.

"Business," Gloria said as the mute driver followed her instruc-tions and turned off the main road and onto a housing estate. "A little unfinished business." "Glencrest Way," Tatiana announced, reading the street sign.

Glencrest Way was followed by Glencrest Close, Glencrest Avenue, Glencrest Road, Glencrest Gardens, and Glencrest Wynd, the ti-tles of all of which Tatiana insisted on reciting, like an exotic replacement for the black car's satellite navigation system, which refused to work among the baffling complexity of the housing es-tate's streets, shielded by the lingering fog of Graham's presence, the cloud of knowing.

"The Glencrest Estate," Gloria said rather redundantly as the black car drew to a halt at the curbside. "Real Homes for Real People. Built on old mine workings." She hauled out the black plastic garbage bag that contained seventy-three thousand, five hundred pounds in twenty-pound notes.

Tatiana leaned against the side of the car and smoked while Gloria dragged the black plastic bag from house to house, distrib-uting bundles of notes on the doorsteps. Not enough for every-one, but then life was a lottery.

"Is tragedy," Tatiana said, shaking her head. "You're one crazy person, Gloria."

They climbed back in the black car and drove away. The bun-dles of notes weren't tied together, and the evening breeze began to lift them and toss them around like giant flakes of ash. In the rearview mirror Gloria caught a glimpse of someone coming out of one of Graham's mean houses--a "Braecroft"--and looking as-tonished at the sight of money flying around in the air.

Feared by the bad, loved by the good. They were bandit queens, they were robber girls. They were outlaws.

Chapter 51

Black space. White light. Applause. The applause sounded quite vigorous to Jackson's ears, but then, apart from a couple of critics, the audience was weighted with friends and family and hangers-on. He was tonight's representative of all those things for Julia, and he had managed to miss the entire performance, slipping in at the back of the theater just in time to see the cast taking their bow. Jackson knew that murder and mayhem weren't good enough excuses for missing Julia's show. Perhaps he should have turned up covered in blood after all.

In the bar afterward the entire cast was giddy with relief, like an overexcited nursery-school class. Tobias made a performance out of making sure everyone had champagne and then giving an extravagant, congratulatory toast that Jackson stopped listening to halfway through. "To us!" they all concluded, clinking their glasses high.

Julia put her arm through his and rested her head against his shoulder.

"How was it for you?" he asked, and he felt her wilt slightly against him.

"Bloody awful," she said. "Whole chunks of that scene on the iceberg went AWOL and that idiot boy didn't give me any of the right lines."

"Scott Marshall? Your lover?"

Julia removed her arm from his.

"Still, you were great," he said, wishing he himself was a better actor. "You were really great."

Julia downed her glass of champagne in one. "And," she said, "when that usher came down the aisles and actually asked if there was a doctor in the house--I mean, not that I wasn't sorry for the man who had the heart attack, but trying to carry on as if nothing were going on . . ."

"These things happen," Jackson said soothingly.

"Yes, they do, but not in tonight's show, Jackson," she snapped. "You weren't there, were you? You managed to miss my opening night! What happened that was so important? Did someone die? Or did someone just say, 'Help me, Jackson'?"

"Well, as it happens--"

"You are so fucking predictable."

"Calm down."

"Calm down?" Never say that to a woman, it was on the first page of the handbook that didn't come with them. "I will not fucking calm down." She lit a cigarette, sucking deeply on it as if it contained Ventolin.

"You shouldn't," he said (words also advised against in the hand-book). "You know you're going to have to stop smoking. And drinking."

"Why?"

"Why do you think?"

"I don't know."There was a new fury in her eyes, a challenge that he knew he shouldn't pick up. And it was ridiculous. It wasn't how he had envisaged this moment at all. He had imagined candles, flowers, a loving-kindness enveloping them both like a shawl. "Because you're pregnant," Jackson said.

"So?" She tilted her chin up defiantly and blew cigarette smoke toward the ceiling, where it joined the polluted cloud above their heads.

"So?" he echoed irritably. "What does that mean? So?"This conversation shouldn't be taking place in a dingy bar crowded with noisy people, but he couldn't think how to maneuver her out of the building. He wondered how she had planned to give him the news. The annunciation. The preciousness of it all was being horribly stained. Then a terrible thought struck him. "You weren't planning to get rid of it, were you?"

She gave him a cold, level look. "Get rid of it?"

"A termination. Jesus, Julia, you can't be thinking of doing that." He almost said, "This might be your only chance," but somehow or other he managed to block that one.

"Just because I've got big tits doesn't necessarily make me ma-ternal, Jackson."

"Julia, you would make a wonderful mother." She would. He couldn't believe that she didn't want to experience motherhood. They had never talked about children, they had talked about marriage but never about children. Why was that? How could a man and a woman have a relationship and not discuss that?

"We've never talked about having children, Jackson. And it's my body and my life."

"My baby," he said.

She raised an eyebrow. "Your baby?"

"Our baby," he amended. Something passed across her face, an immense sadness and regret. She shook her head and stubbed the cigarette out in an ashtray on the bar. Then she looked at him and said, "I'm sorry, Jackson. It's not. It's not yours."