“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.
L
ouise 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.
O
n 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.”
“
T
his 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.”
H
e 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?”