One Good Turn (27 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, sir,” the policeman said, “it is.”

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

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

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

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

“Do you have any identification on you, sir?”

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

“Have you reported the theft, sir?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instead of moving away, the old woman shuffled closer to Martin and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “Alex Blake, the crime writer—he’s been murdered.”

“I’m Alex Blake,” Martin said.

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

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

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

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

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

“How did he die?” Did he really want to know?

“We’re still waiting for the results of the autopsy, Mr. Canning.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

R
obert Campbell escorted Martin to “his friend’s room.” Martin wanted to say, “He’s not my friend,” but that seemed cruel and heartless, considering what had happened.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fan mail? What kind of fan mail?”

“‘Richard Mott, you’re a wanking wanker.’That kind.”

“And was he?” Robert Campbell asked.

“Yes.”

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