The circus on the Meadows didn’t hold out the same promises and terrors as the circus of long ago. It was a Russian circus, although there was nothing particularly Russian about spinning plates, trapezes, and high-wire work, only the clowns acknowl-edged their national origins in an act based on Russian dolls- “matryoshka,” it declared in the program. The word of the day. He thought of the boxes that had been stacked in the hall of the Fa-vors office, stenciled with MATRYOSHKA. He felt the peanut-baby doll in his jacket pocket. The layers of the onion. Chinese boxes, Chinese whispers. Secrets within secrets. Dolls within dolls.
The ringmaster (what Julia had meant by “circus wallah chappie,” presumably) looked like ringmasters the world over, the black top hat, the red tailcoat, the whip-he looked more like he was about to orchestrate a foxhunt than MC a load of spangled kitsch. He was way too tall to hold any attraction for Julia. The circus, the program also said, shared space with “The Lady Boys of Bangkok,” Jackson was relieved some passing Lady Boy hadn’t given Julia tickets for his/her show.
“Murdered,” Julia said. Last night he had watched Richard Mott onstage, now the poor guy was in a refrigerator somewhere. Jack-son would have applauded him more generously if he’d known it was his final appearance. Was he murdered because he wasn’t funny? People killed for less. The reasons people killed other peo-ple had often seemed trivial to Jackson when he was with the po-lice, but he supposed it was different from the inside. He had once been in charge of a case where an eighty-year-old man had hit his wife on the head with a mash hammer because she’d burned his morning porridge, and when Jackson said to the old bloke that it didn’t seem like a reason that was going to stand up in court, the man said, “But she burned it every morning for fifty-eight years.” (“You could have had a word about it with her earlier,” a DS said dryly to him, but that wasn’t how it worked in a marriage, Jack-son knew that.) When you retold it, it seemed almost funny, but there had been nothing comical in seeing the old woman’s brains all over the worn linoleum or watching the old guy, all rheumy eyes and shaking hands, being put in the back of a police car.
To be honest, Jackson was surprised that more people didn’t kill each other. Julia was definitely lying to him about something.
One face in the sea of faces across the other side of the ring caught his attention. It wasn’t just a cliché, it really was a sea of faces, he found it almost impossible to focus on one. He’d been under the impression that long sight was supposed to improve with age and short sight deteriorate (or was it the other way round?), but he seemed to be losing out on both of them. But if he concentrated, no, it was actually better if he didn’t concentrate, he could make out the girl. Her face was tilted upward, watching the trapeze artists, her expression serene, beatific. Her eyes only half-open, as if she were watching but thinking of something else. She was so like the dead girl it was impossible. His girl, curled up on the rocks, a mermaid dreaming, and he had disturbed her sleep. He squinted, trying to make out the features of the girl in the au-dience, but his focus slipped and she was gone, swimming off into the sea of faces.
He fell asleep while a human pyramid was being constructed out of acrobats, and when he woke he felt disoriented. The roof of the big top was dark blue, spangled with silver stars, and it reminded him of something but he couldn’t think what, and then he realized it was the roof-the vault of heaven-in a side chapel at the Catholic church where his mother dragged them three times a day on a Sunday when they were very small, until she ran out of energy and let the devil have them.
Maybe Julia wasn’t lying exactly, just not telling the truth.
When Jackson exited the big top on the Meadows along with the rest of the audience, he was greeted by a pearly dusk. The gloaming. It was so much lighter up here, a transient Nordic light that spoke to his soul. He took a seat on a bench and turned his phone on. There was a text from Julia, “In the trav bar come and find us” (not even a “J” or a single “x” this time, he noticed, let alone “love” or punctuation). It sounded more like a challenge or a treasure hunt than an invitation to a drink. He guessed “the trav” was the Traverse, which was both good and bad, good because it was nearby and he was sure he knew how to get there, bad because he’d been there the first night with Julia and the cast, and it was a smoky underground place full of posers up from London. Maybe he could persuade her out of there, take her to one of the many Italian restaurants around this part of town. He seemed to remember a plan to cook for her tonight. The best laid plans of mice and men. They had studied that book at school, that is to say his fellow pupils had studied it at school, Jackson had looked out the window or played truant. He remembered the little plaque at the Scottish War Memorial. THE TUNNELLERS’ FRIENDS. He felt strangely bereft.
Although there were still plenty of people milling about, light was fading fast on the Meadows, and away from the streetlamps that bordered the paths there were now murky pools of darkness presenting opportunities for all kinds of transgression. Everything suddenly seemed darker, and Jackson realized that the lights on the big top had been switched off. Something seemed to drop inside him, a leaden weight, a memory of walking home from that circus forty-odd years ago, holding his mother’s hand-his mother was no more than a shadow of a memory now-walking away up a hill, it was a town built on hills, and looking back and seeing the big top, ablaze with lights, being abruptly plunged into darkness. It had disturbed him in a way that, as a small boy, he couldn’t put words to. Now he knew it was melancholy. Melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic-that was what Louise Monroe had called him yester-day. “You seem remarkably phlegmatic, Mr. Brodie.” What was the fourth? Sanguine. But melancholy, that was his own true humor. A miserable bastard, in other words.
“The lamps are going out all over Europe,” he thought. God, that was a wretched quotation. He had been reading a lot of military history lately, courtesy of Amazon. He thought of the Binyon poem again. “At the going down of the sun.” The rest of the verses were crap. Earl Grey was actually watching the streetlamps being lit, not put out, although, of course, some people thought it was an apocryphal quotation. God, would you look at him, a sad middle-aged loser sitting on a park bench at twilight thinking about an old war he never took part in. Jackson rarely thought about the wars he had taken part in. All he needed was a can of lager. When had he started thinking of himself as a loser? “We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” He wouldn’t blame Julia if she had grown bored with him.
And then, instantly, his self-pity was forgotten because there she was. It was her, it was his dead girl. He hadn’t imagined her in the big top, she had been there and now she was here, walking across the Meadows, in and out of the shadows cast by the trees, coming toward him.
She was wearing heels and a short summer skirt so that you couldn’t help but admire her perfect legs. He stood up abruptly and set off toward her, wondering what he should say-“Hey,you look just like a dead girl I know”? As opening conversational gambits went, it left something to be desired. He knew she wasn’t really his dead girl, unless the dead had begun to walk, which he was pretty sure they hadn’t. He couldn’t imagine the kind of chaos that would ensue if they did.
And then-and in Jackson’s opinion this was becoming just a wee bit tiresome-who should slip out of the shadows but his old enemy, Honda Man. Terence Smith creeping up behind the not-dead girl on tiptoe in a way that reminded Jackson of a cartoon character. The man was a juggernaut, juggernauts shouldn’t try to tiptoe. The girl might not be dead, but it looked as if Terence Smith were intending to make her that way, not with his trusty bat in his hand but a length of what looked like nylon rope. Dog, bat, rope-he was a one-man arsenal. “Hey!” Jackson yelled to get the girl’s attention. “Behind you!” Did he really say that? But it was no pantomime joke and no pantomime thuggee-Terence Smith already had the rope round her neck. Jackson’s warning cry had alerted her, however, and she had managed to get her hands on the rope, tugging on it for all she was worth to prevent Terence Smith from tightening it.