One Good Turn

  ALSO BY KATE ATKINSON

  Case Histories

  Not the End of the World

  Emotionally Weird

  Human Croquet

  Behind the Scenes at the Museum

  For Debbie, Glynis, Judith, Lynn, Penny, Sheila, and Tessa.

  For the way we were and for the way we are.

  Male parta, male dilabuntur.

  (What is dishonorably got is dishonorably squandered.)

  —CICERO , Philippic II, 27

  TUESDAY

  1

  He was lost. He wasn’t used to being lost. He was the kind of man who drew up plans and then executed them efficiently, but now everything was conspiring against him in ways he decided he couldn’t have foreseen. He had been stuck in a jam on the A1 for two mind-numbing hours so that it was already past the middle of the morning when he arrived in Edinburgh. Then he’d gone adrift on a one-way system and been thwarted by a road that had been closed because of a burst water main. It had been raining, steadily and unforgivingly, on the drive north and had only begun to ease off as he hit the outskirts of town. The rain had in no way deterred the crowds—it had never occurred to him that Edinburgh was in the middle of the Festival and that there would be carnival hordes of people milling around as if the end of a war had just been declared. The closest he had previously got to the Edinburgh Festival was when he accidentally turned on Late Night Review and saw a bunch of middle-class wankers discussing some pretentious piece of fringe theater.

  He ended up in the dirty heart of the city, on a street that somehow seemed to be on a lower level than the rest of the town, a blackened urban ravine. The rain had left the cobbles slick and greasy, and he had to drive cautiously because the street was teeming with people, haphazardly crossing over or standing in little knots in the middle of the road, as if no one had told them that roads were for cars and pavements were for pedestrians. A queue snaked the length of the street—people waiting to get into what looked like a bomb hole in the wall but which announced itself as FRINGE VENUE 164 on a large placard outside the door.

  The name on the driver’s license in his wallet was Paul Bradley. “Paul Bradley” was a nicely forgettable name. He was several degrees of separation away from his real name now, a name that no longer felt as if it had ever belonged to him. When he wasn’t working, he often (but not always) went by the name “Ray.” Nice and simple. Ray of light, Ray of darkness. Ray of sunshine, Ray of night. He liked slipping between identities, sliding through the cracks. The rental Peugeot he was driving felt just right, not a flashy macho machine but the kind of car an ordinary guy would drive. An ordinary guy like Paul Bradley. If anyone asked him what he did, what Paul Bradley did, he would say, “Boring stuff. I’m just a desk jockey, pushing papers around in an accounts department.”

  He was trying to drive and at the same time decipher his A-Z of Edinburgh to work out how to escape this hellish street, when someone stepped in front of the car. It was a type he loathed—a young, dark-haired guy with thick, black-framed spectacles, two days of stubble, and a fag hanging out of his mouth, there were hundreds of them in London, all trying to look like French existentialists from the sixties. He’d bet that not one of them had ever opened a book on philosophy. He’d read the lot—Plato, Kant, Hegel—even thought about getting a degree someday.

  He braked hard and didn’t hit the spectacles guy, just made him give a little jump, like a bullfighter avoiding the bull. The guy was furious, waving his fag around, shouting, raising a finger to him. Charmless, devoid of manners—were his parents proud of the job they’d done? He hated smoking, it was a disgusting habit, hated guys who gave you the finger and screamed, “Spin on it,” saliva flying out of their filthy, nicotine-stained mouths.

  He felt the bump, about the same force as hitting a badger or a fox on a dark night, except it came from behind, pushing him forward. It was just as well the spectacles guy had performed his little paso doble and gotten out of the way or he would have been pancaked. He looked in the rearview mirror. A blue Honda Civic, the driver climbing out—a big guy with slabs of weight-lifter muscle, gym-fit rather than survival-fit, he wouldn’t have been able to last three months in the jungle or the desert the way that Ray could have. He wouldn’t have lasted a day. He was wearing driving gloves, ugly black leather ones with knuckle holes. He had a dog in the back of the car, a beefy rottweiler, exactly the dog you would have guessed a guy like that would have. The man was a walking cliché. The dog was having a seizure in the back, spraying saliva all over the window, its claws scrabbling on the glass. The dog didn’t worry him too much. He knew how to kill dogs.

  Ray got out of the car and walked round to the back bumper to inspect the damage. The Honda driver started yelling at him, “You stupid fucking twat, what did you think you were doing?” English. Ray tried to think of something to say that would be nonconfrontational, that would calm the guy down—you could see he was a pressure cooker waiting to blow, wanting to blow, bouncing on his feet like an out-of-condition heavyweight. Ray adopted a neutral stance, a neutral expression, but then he heard the crowd give a little collective “Aah” of horror and he registered the baseball bat that had suddenly appeared in the guy’s hand out of nowhere and thought, Shit.

  That was the last thought he had for several seconds. When he was able to think again he was sprawled on the street, holding the side of his head where the guy had cracked him. He heard the sound of broken glass, the bastard was putting in every window in his car now. He tried, unsuccessfully, to struggle to his feet but only managed to get to a kneeling position as if he were at prayer, and now the guy was advancing with the bat lifted, feeling the heft of it in his hand, ready to swing for a home run on his skull. Ray put an arm up to defend himself, made himself even more dizzy by doing that, and, sinking back onto the cobbles, thought, Jesus, is this it? He’d given up, he’d actually given up—something he’d never done before—when someone stepped out of the crowd, wielding something square and black that he threw at the Honda guy, clipping him on the shoulder and sending him reeling.

  He blacked out again for a few seconds, and when he came to there were a couple of policewomen hunkered down beside him, one of them saying, “Just take it easy, sir,” the other one on her radio calling for an ambulance. It was the first time in his life that he’d been glad to see the police.

  2

  Martin had never done anything like that in his life before. He didn’t even kill flies in the house, instead he patiently stalked them, trapping them with a glass and a plate before letting them free. The meek shall inherit the earth. He was fifty and had never knowingly committed an act of violence against another living creature, although sometimes he thought that might have more to do with cowardice than pacifism.

  He had stood in the queue, waiting for someone else to intervene in the scene unfolding before them, but the crowd was in audience mode, like promenaders at a particularly brutal piece of theater, and they had no intention of spoiling the entertainment. Even Martin had wondered at first if it was another show—a faux-impromptu piece intended either to shock or to reveal our immunity to being shocked because we lived in a global media community where we had become passive voyeurs of violence (and so on). That was the line of thought running through the detached, intellectual part of his brain. His primitive brain, on the other hand, was thinking, Oh fuck, this is horrible, really horrible, please make the bad man go away. He wasn’t surprised to hear his father’s voice in his head (“Pull yourself together, Martin”). His father had been dead for many years, but Martin often still heard the bellow and yell of his parade-ground tones. When the Honda driver finished breaking the windows of the silver Peugeot and walked toward the driver, brandishing his weapon and preparing himself for a final victo
ry blow, Martin realized that the man on the ground was probably going to die, was probably going to be killed by the crazed man with the bat, right there in front of them, unless someone did something, and, instinctively, without thinking about it at all—because if he’d thought about it he might not have done it—he slipped his bag off his shoulder and swung it, hammer-throw fashion, at the head of the insane Honda driver.

  He missed the man’s head, which didn’t surprise him, he’d never been able to aim or catch, he was the kind of person who ducked when a ball was thrown in his direction, but his laptop was in the bag and the hard weighty edge of it caught the Honda driver on the shoulder and sent him spinning.

  The nearest Martin had been to a real crime scene previously had been on a Society of Authors’ trip around St. Leonard’s Police Station. Apart from Martin, the group consisted entirely of women. “You’re our token man,” one of them said to him, and he sensed a certain disappointment in the polite laughter of the others, as if the least he could have done as their token man was be a little less like a woman.

  They had been offered coffee and biscuits—chocolate bourbons, pink-wafer sandwiches; they had all been impressed by the assortment—and a “senior policeman” had given a pleasant talk in a new conference room that felt as if it had been specially designed for groups such as theirs. Then they were shown round various parts of the building, the call center and the cavernous space of a room where people in plain clothes (NCIS) who were sitting at the computers glanced briefly at the “authors,” decided, correctly, that they were irrelevant, and returned to their screens.

  They had all stood in a lineup, one of their members had her fingerprints taken, and then they were locked—briefly—in a cell, where they had shuffled and giggled to take the edge off the claustrophobia. The word “giggle,” it struck Martin, was an almost exclusively female verb. Women giggle, men simply laugh. Martin worried that he was a bit of a giggler himself. At the end of the tour, as if it had been staged for their benefit, they witnessed, with a little frisson of fear, a team being hastily assembled in riot gear to remove a “difficult” prisoner from a cell.

  The tour hadn’t had much relevance to the kind of books that Martin wrote, in the person of his alter ego Alex Blake.They were old-fashioned, soft-boiled crime novels featuring a heroine named Nina Riley, a gung ho kind of girl who had inherited a detective agency from her uncle. The books were set in the forties, just after the war. It was an era in history that Martin felt particularly drawn to, the monochrome deprivation of it, the undertow of seedy disappointment in the wake of heroism. The Vienna of The Third Man, the Home Counties of Brief Encounter.What must it have felt like to have pinned your colors to the standard of a just war, to have experienced so many noble feelings (yes, a lot of propaganda, but the kernel of it was true), to have been released from the burden of individualism? To have stood on the edge of destruction and defeat and come through. And thought, Now what? Of course, Nina Riley didn’t feel any of those things, she was only twenty-two and had seen out the war in a Swiss finishing school. And she wasn’t real.

  Nina Riley had always been a tomboy, though she had no apparent lesbian tendencies and was constantly courted by a great variety of men, with whom she was remarkably chaste. (“It’s as if,” an “appreciative reader”wrote to him,“a Chalet School head girl grew up and became a detective.”) She lived in a geographically vague version of Scotland that contained sea and mountains and rolling moorland, all within a fast drive of every major town in Scotland (and, frequently, England, although never Wales, something Martin thought he should perhaps rectify) in Nina Riley’s racy, open-top Bristol. When he wrote the first Nina Riley book, he had conceived it as an affectionate nod in the direction of an earlier time and an earlier form. “A pastiche, if you will,” he said nervously, when he was introduced to his editor at the publishing house. “A kind of ironic homage.” It had been a surprise to find that he was being published. He had written the book to entertain himself and suddenly he was sitting in a featureless London office feeling he had to justify the nonsense he had created to a young woman who seemed to find it difficult to keep her mind on him.

  “Be that as it may,” she said, making a visible effort to look at him, “what I see is a book I can sell. A sort of jolly murder mystery. People crave nostalgia, the past is like a drug. How many books do you envisage in the series?”

  “Series?”

  “Hi.”

  Martin turned round and saw a man leaning against the doorjamb in an attitude of studied casualness. He was older than Martin but dressed younger.

  “Hi,” the young editor said in return, giving the man her rapt attention. Their minimal exchange seemed to carry almost more meaning than it could bear. “Neil Winters, our MD,”she said with a proud smile. “This is Martin Canning, Neil. He’s written a wonderful book.”

  “Fantastic,” Neil Winters said, shaking Martin’s hand. His hand was damp and soft and made Martin think of something dead you might pick up on the beach. “The first of many, I hope,” Neil Winters said.

  Within a couple weeks Neil Winters was transported into more elevated echelons in the European mother ship and Martin never saw him again, but nevertheless he saw that handshake as the identifiable moment when his life changed.

  Martin had recently sold the television rights for the Nina Riley books. “Like getting into a warm bath. Perfect fodder for the Sunday evening slot,” the BBC producer said, making it sound like an insult, which, of course, it was.

  In the two-dimensional fictional world that she inhabited, Nina Riley had so far solved three murders, a jewel theft, and a bank robbery; retrieved a stolen racehorse; prevented the kidnapping of the infant Prince Charles from Balmoral; and, on her sixth outing, foiled a plot (almost single-handedly) to steal the Scottish crown jewels. The seventh, The Monkey Puzzle Tree, was currently new in paperback and was featured on the “Three for Two”tables in every bookshop. The seventh was “darker,” everyone seemed to agree (“Blake is finally moving toward a more mature noir style,” “a reader” had written on Amazon. Everyone’s a critic), but despite this, his sales remained “buoyant,” according to his agent, Melanie. “No end in sight yet, Martin,” she said. Melanie was Irish, and this made everything she said sound nice even when it wasn’t.

  If people asked him—as they frequently did—why he had become a writer, Martin usually answered that, as he spent most of his time in his imagination, it had seemed like a good idea to get paid for it. He said this jovially, no giggling, and people smiled as if he’d said something amusing. What they didn’t understand was that it was the truth—he lived inside his head. Not in an intellectual or philosophical way, his interior life was remarkably banal. He didn’t know if it was the same for everyone, did other people spend their time daydreaming about a better version of the everyday? No one ever talked about the life of the imagination, except in terms of some kind of Keatsian high art. No one mentioned the pleasure of picturing yourself sitting in a deck chair on a lawn, beneath a cloudless midsummer sky, contemplating the spread of a proper, old-fashioned afternoon tea, prepared by a cozy woman with a mature bosom and spotless apron who said things like, “Come on, now, eat up, ducks,” because this was how cozy women with mature bosoms spoke in Martin’s imagination, an odd kind of sub-Dickensian discourse.

  The world inside his head was so much better than the world outside his head. Scones, homemade black-currant jam, clotted cream. Overhead, swallows sliced through the blue, blue sky, swooping and diving like Battle of Britain pilots. The distant thock of leather on willow. The scent of hot, strong tea and new-mown grass. Surely these things were infinitely preferable to a terrifyingly angry man with a baseball bat?

  Martin had been hauling his laptop around with him because the lunchtime comedy showcase he had been queuing for was a detour on today’s (very tardy) path to his “office.” He had recently rented the “office” in a refurbished block in Marchmont. It had once been a licensed grocer
but now provided a bland, featureless space—plasterboard walls and laminate floors, broadband connections and halogen lighting—to a firm of architects, an IT consultancy, and, now, Martin. He had rented the “office” in the vain hope that if he left the house to go and write every day and kept normal working hours like other people, it would somehow help him to overcome the lethargy that had descended on the book he was currently working on (Death on the Black Isle). He suspected it was a bad sign that he thought of the “office” as a place that existed only in quotation marks, a fictional concept rather than a location where anything was actually achieved.

  Death on the Black Isle was like a book under an enchantment: no matter how much he wrote, there never seemed to be any more of it. “You should change the title. It sounds like a Tintin book,” Melanie said. Before being published eight years ago, Martin had been a religious studies teacher, and for some reason, at an early stage of their relationship, Melanie had got it into her head (and never been able to get it out again) that Martin had once been in a monastery. How she had made this leap he had never understood. True, he had a premature tonsure of thinning hair, but apart from that he didn’t think there was anything particularly monastic about him. It didn’t matter how much he had tried to disabuse Melanie of her fixation, it was still the thing that she found most interesting about him. It was Melanie who had disseminated this misinformation to his publicist, who had, in turn, broadcast it to the world at large. It was on public record, it was in the cuttings file and on the Internet, and no matter how many times Martin said to a journalist, “No, actually I was never a monk. That’s a mistake,” he or she still made it the fulcrum of the interview: “Blake demurs when the priesthood is mentioned.” Or “Alex Blake dismisses his early religious calling, but there is still something cloistered about his character.” And so on.