Finally she gave in and, using the only lingua franca understood by fourteen-year-old boys, texted him, “Are u home? Eat something from the freezer. I may be late. Love Mum x.” It was odd to give her-self that appellation, to commit it to writing, she never thought of herself as “Mum.” Maybe that was where she’d gone wrong. Had she gone wrong? Probably.
Archie could just about manage to take a pizza or a burger from the freezer and put it in the microwave.There was no point in trying to get him to do anything more challenging (“An omelet, surely you can manage an omelet?”).
Her phone rang, not Archie but Jim Tucker. “My girl died of a heroin overdose,” he said without preamble. “No identity yet. The forensic dentist said her mouth was, and I quote, ‘full of crap,’ by which he meant foreign fillings, Eastern European, by the look of it.”
“No dental records, then,” Louise said.
“No, and I don’t know if it’s likely, but someone said that they thought Favors were cleaners.”
“Cleaners?”
As soon as she’d said good-bye to Jim Tucker, her phone rang again. “I’ve been trying to phone you,”Archie complained.
“I try to phone you all the time and you never answer.”
“Can Hamish stay over tonight?”
“It’s a school night.”
“We’ve got a geography project we have to do together.”
“What project?”A short, muffled conversation ensued, Hamish tutoring Archie, no doubt, before he came back on the line and said smugly, “Discuss the transport factors influencing the location of industry.”
It was plausible, Hamish was good. “Does his mother say he can?”
“Of course.”
“Okay.”
“And can we get a takeaway?”
“Okay. Do you have money?”
“Yes.”
“Will you remember to feed the cat?”
“Whatever.”
“That’s not the answer I’m looking for.”
“Yessss. Okay? Jesus.”
Louise sighed, she really, really wanted a drink. A lime daiquiri. Cold enough to freeze her brain. And then she’d like to have a lot of sex. Casual, mindless, faceless, emotion-free sex. You would think casual sex would be easy, but no. She’d hardly had any since Archie hit adolescence. You couldn’t just bring a guy home and shag him while your teenage son was playing Grand Theft Auto on the other side of a wafer-thin plasterboard wall. Every year there was a fresh surprise, something you didn’t know about having a kid. Maybe it went on like that forever, maybe when Archie was sixty and Louise was in her eighties, she’d be thinking, “Well, I didn’t realize sixty-year-old men did that.”
She watched a uniformed PC tap on Jessica’s window and hand her something.
“What did the UB want?” she asked, climbing back in the car.
“Brought this,” Jessica said, handing her a copy of the Evening News, helpfully turned to an inside page where she pointed out the small headline POLICE ASK PUBLIC FOR HELP WITH THEIR INQUIRIES.
“It’s not very obvious, is it?” Sandy said. “‘Police are asking if any-one saw a woman go into the water’-‘go into the water’? That’s very vague.”
“Well, it is very vague,” Louise said. “She was found in the water and somehow or other she got into it.”
“If she exists,” Jessica said. She sneezed, and Sandy said, “Hope you’re not getting the ‘flu.’ ” Louise didn’t care if Jessica got the “flu.”
Louise felt suddenly incredibly tired. “Bugger this for a game of soldiers. They’re putting out something on Radio Forth tomorrow, but in reality that’s it for now. If there’s a body out there, then it’ll probably wash up eventually. I don’t see what more we can do.”
“I don’t think there ever was a body,” Jessica said. “I think Brodie made the whole thing up. I know where the nut is and it’s not on the tree.”
“I didn’t like the guy,” Sandy said with the certainty of one who thinks his own moral judgment is unimpeachable. “I’m all for calling it a day.” He turned to Jessica and said, “Home, James.”
28
Jackson had a hellish vision of being stuck on one bus or an-other forever. This time it was one of the open-top tourist ones that lumber around British cities, holding up the traffic. Jackson had taken Marlee on the Cambridge one last year, thinking it would be an easy way of absorbing some (probably revisionist) his-tory, but now he couldn’t remember a thing they had been told. It was cold on the upper deck, and a miserable wind seemed to have whipped itself across the North Sea with the sole intention of hitting Jackson on the back of the neck. This, Jackson reminded himself, was why he had moved to another country.
The Royal Mile was beginning to feel almost familiar to Jackson now, he felt like turning to the nearest person and pointing out St. Giles Church and the new Parliament Building (ten times overbudget-how could anything be ten times overbud-get?). The real tour guide was a melodramatically inclined middle-aged woman working for tips. It was the kind of job that a hard up Julia would take.
The bus trundled along Princes Street-no dark Gothicism here, only ugly high-street chain shops. It began to spit with rain, and less hardy foreign souls sought out the shelter of the lower deck, leaving only a scattering of Brits huddled under umbrellas and cagoules. He was half-listening to the tour guide telling them about witches (otherwise known as women, of course) being thrown alive into the Nor Loch, “which is now unrecognizable as our ‘world-famous’ Princes Street Gardens” (everything in Edinburgh was “world-famous,” apparently-he wondered if that was true-famous in Somalia? in Bhutan?), when he noticed a pink van, a CitroꬠCombo, in the lane next to them. They were at a red traffic light, and when it changed to amber, the van moved off. Jackson wasn’t thinking anything much at the time except for You don’t see many pink vans, but a semiconscious part of his brain read the words emblazoned on the side panel of the van in black lettering-FAVORS-WE DO WHAT YOU WANT US TO DO!, and another semiconscious part of his brain dredged up the little pink card that had been in the dead girl’s bra yesterday.
The two semiconscious parts of Jackson’s brain finally commu-nicated with each other. This was a slower process than it used to be-Jackson imagined signal flags rather than high-speed broad-band. One day, he supposed, the different parts of his brain would find they were unable to interpret the messages. Flags waving helplessly in the wind. And that would be it. Senility.
Jackson sprinted down the stairs, past the huddled masses in steerage, and asked the driver to open the doors. The pink van was farther up Princes Street now, Jackson could have kept up with it at a jog, but sooner or later it was going to untangle itself from this traffic and then he would lose it. He dashed across the street in front of a hooting bus bearing down on him (buses had somehow become the bane of his life) and, at the taxi rank on Hanover Street, threw himself into the back of a black cab. “Where to?” the driver asked, and Jackson felt absurdly pleased with himself that he was able to say, “See that pink van? Follow it.”
They weaved their way through the leafy pleasantness of subur-ban Edinburgh. (“Morningside,” the cab driver said.) No mean streets these, Jackson thought. The black cab felt lumbering and ob-vious, hardly the ideal vehicle for covert activity. Still, the driver of the pink van didn’t seem to notice, perhaps the black cab was so obvious that you couldn’t see it. He supposed he should phone it in. He had Louise Monroe’s card with her station number on it. The phone was answered by some kind of minion who said that “Inspector Monroe” was “out of the office” and did he want to leave a message? He didn’t, thank you. He redialed the number (in his experience, a phone was hardly ever answered twice in a row by the same person) and had Louise Monroe’s out-of-office status reiterated. He asked for her mobile number and was refused. If she had really wanted him to keep in touch, she should have given it to him, shouldn’t she? No one could say he hadn’t tried. It wasn’t his fault if he had gone rogue, the renegade old lone wolf. Solving crimes.