The soot had long since been blasted off the face of Edinburgh, but the stonework in this place was still encrusted with the black reminder of the capital’s reeking past. It was a cold, unloved place, strangely untouched by the hand of either the Enlightenment or the property developer.

Favors was squeezed in between a restaurant (a self-styled “bistro”) and Fringe Venue 87. Jackson peered into the dim and meaty interior of the bistro, where the last few lunch customers still lingered. He made a mental note never to eat there. From the outside, the Fringe venue looked like a sauna, but it proved to be housing a disgruntled group of American high school children playing The Caucasian Chalk Circle to an audience of two men who looked as if they might have also mistaken the venue for a sauna. Julia had warned him about Edinburgh “saunas.” “Don’t for one minute imagine that they are actually saunas, Jackson.”

The office had an unremarkable black-painted street door on whose jamb was fixed a cheap plastic nameplate that read FA-VORS-IMPORT AND EXPORT. No exclamatory promise to fulfill his desires, he noticed. “Import” and “export”-if ever there were two words that covered a multitude of sins, these were they. There was a security camera above the buzzer so that it was impossible to stand at the door without being scrutinized. He put on his most trustworthy face and got in by posing as a courier. No one ever seemed to ask couriers for their IDs.

He had to go up a stair and along a corridor that was stacked with industrial-size containers of cleaning fluids. HAZARDOUS MA-TERIALS, one of them said. Another sported a black skull and crossbones, but the writing on the container was in a language that Jackson didn’t recognize. He thought about Marijut, wringing the cloth out, cleaning the draining board with her washerwoman hands. If nothing else, he could report Favors to Environmental Health. Another wall of boxes was stenciled with one mysterious word: MATRYOSHKA.

Perhaps Favors was some kind of crime cartel that was running everything in the city. And what was it with the crucifixes? A Vatican-run crime cartel?

“This woman had crucifixes in her ears,” Jackson said to the receptionist. “Crosses.” He took a pen from her desk and drew a crucifix on a pad of paper and pointed at his ears. “Earrings,” he said, like yours, he pointed toward the silver hoops in the recep-tionist’s ears. She looked at him as if he were mad. Marijut had told him that she didn’t recall seeing any girl with crucifix earrings. His description, “Five six, hundred twenty pounds, blond hair,” could easily have fitted half the girls she knew. “Me, for ex-ample,” she said. Or the receptionist.

Jackson tapped the computer monitor and said, “Let’s look in here.”The girl gave him a surly glare and then scrolled idly down the screen.

“What do you want her for?” the girl asked.

“I don’t want her for anything. I want to know if she’s on your books.” Jackson craned his neck to catch a glimpse of the screen. The girl opened a file that looked like a CV, there was a thumb-nail photograph in the top left-hand corner, but she closed it down immediately. “Stop,” he said. “Go back, go back to that last one.” It was her, he could swear it was her. His dead girl.

“She doesn’t work for us anymore,” the receptionist said. She gave a little hiccup of laughter as if she were making a joke. “Her contract is terminated.” She clicked the files shut with an air of fi-nality and turned off the screen.

“This woman I’m looking for,” he enunciated each word slowly and clearly, “this woman is dead.” Jackson made a slashing move-ment across his throat. The girl shrank away from him. He wasn’t very good at miming. He could have done with Julia’s help, no one played charades with as much enthusiasm as Julia, except per-haps for Marlee. How did you portray dead? He crossed his arms over his chest and closed his eyes. When he opened them, the Housekeeper was standing in front of him, regarding him quizzically. “He says he’s courier,” the girl at the computer said sarcastically. “Does he?” the Housekeeper said. “I’m looking for someone,” Jackson said stoutly, “a girl who’s gone missing.” “What’s her name?” the Housekeeper asked. “I don’t know.” “You’re looking for someone and you don’t know who she is?” “I can give you someone else,” the girl at the computer screen offered. “I don’t want someone else,” Jackson said. “What kind of agency are you?”

The girl leaned closer to him over the desk and, giving Jackson a predatory kind of smile, said, “What kind of agency would you like us to be?”

29

“No room at the inn,” the policewoman assigned to look after Martin said. They were sitting in a car outside the police mortuary, waiting while a civilian on the radio back at head-quarters tried to find him somewhere to stay for the night. He couldn’t sleep among the aftermath of the carnage in his “active-crime-scene” house, wouldn’t have wanted to if he could. “You don’t have any friends you could stay the night with?” the police-woman asked. No, he didn’t. She gave him a sympathetic look. There was his brother in the Borders, of course, but there was little in the way of sanctuary to be had in his household, and he doubted he would be welcome there, anyway.

“Clare” (“PC Clare Deponio”) looked like one of the police-women who had come to Paul Bradley’s aid yesterday, but they all looked alike in their uniforms. The police car was parked almost exactly where the Honda and the Peugeot had faced off against each other yesterday. Who would have thought that event would have faded into such insignificance?

“The Festival,” Clare said, coming off the radio, “no hotel rooms anywhere, apparently.”

Superintendent Campbell had handed Martin over to someone only slightly more menial (“Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutherland”). Sutherland took (“accompanied”) Martin from his own house to a police station, where Martin had his fingerprints taken-it was exactly like the Society of Authors’ tour-the inspector said it was “for comparison,” but after that it stopped being like the Society of Authors’ tour because they gave him a white paper boilersuit to wear and took all his clothes away while they put him in an interview room and questioned him for a long time about his relationship with Richard Mott and his whereabouts at the time of Richard’s death. Martin felt like a convict. He was given tea and biscuits-Rich Tea, to denote his change in status. Pink wafers and chocolate bourbons for the innocent members of the Society of Authors, plain Rich Tea for people who spent drugged nights in dodgy hotel rooms with men. (“So you and Mr. Bradley slept together? In the same bed?”) He still hadn’t mentioned the gun. Inspector Sutherland enjoyed pretending to be baffled. “I’m having trouble getting my head round this, Mr. Canning- you saved a stranger’s life, you spent the night with him, but he disappeared before dawn. Meanwhile, in your own house, your friend was being bludgeoned to death.”

Paul Bradley had an address in London, Martin remembered the nurse in A and E copying it down, the same address that he had watched him write in the hotel register.

“The Met are looking into it for us,” Sutherland said. Sutherland reminded Martin of someone, but he couldn’t think who. He had this unsettling way of smiling at inappropriate mo-ments so that Martin, who tended to smile when he was smiled at, found himself responding with an inane grin to statements such as, “Mr. Mott’s skull was shattered by a blunt instrument.”

A female detective sergeant sat next to Sutherland. She was silent throughout, like a mute. There was a mirror on the wall, and Martin wondered if it was two-way. He couldn’t think why else you would have a mirror in an interview room. Was someone in the looking-glass world watching him dunk his convict-grade biscuit into his tea?