He walked up the high street with Louise, the farther up the street they got, the more revelers they encountered, plus all the usual sus-pects-fire-eaters, jugglers, unicyclists, or any combination of the three. A guy on a unicycle juggling with flaming torches, really pushing the envelope. There was a woman pretending to be some kind of living statue of Marie Antoinette. Was that really a suitable job for a woman? For anyone, come to that? How would he feel if Marlee grew up and announced she wanted to do that for a living?

“Oh, I don’t know,” Louise Monroe said, “doing absolutely nothing all day, I could do with some of that.”

“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, trust me.”

They hesitated awkwardly on the pavement at a crossroad for a few seconds as if they were both unsure of the correct form of farewell address. For a delusional second Jackson thought she was going to kiss him on the cheek, one half of him hoped she would, the other half was terrified she would, good and bad Jacksons having a little tussle. But she just said, “Right. I’ll let you know if anything turns up.”

“Anything?”

“Your girl.”

“His” dead girl, he ruminated. She was his girl, for better or worse, no one else wanted to own her or claim her or even acknowledge her existence.

“Well, good night,” she said.

“I don’t suppose you want to go to the circus, do you?”

31

Martin was in a different room at the Four Clans. He was lying on the bed, trying to have a nap. His body was exhausted, but his brain had apparently discovered a secret amphetamine factory and was popping pills at will. The picture on the wall oppo-site his bed was a print of Burke and Hare caught in the act of gleefully digging up a dead body, almost, but not quite, trumping the flaming witch of the previous room. He sat up and twisted round in order to see what was hanging above the bed. The Battle of Flodden Field, the slaughter of the Scots in full swing. Twenty-four hours ago he didn’t even know that the Four Clans existed, now his entire life seemed contained within its tartan walls. He was being brainwashed by plaid.

He turned the television on and caught an evening Scottish news bulletin. “The comic Richard Mott… battered to death… home of crime writer Alex Blake… earlier in an extraordinary mix-up… reclusive writer Alex Blake, whose real name was… a spokesman for Lothian and Borders Police said that they are appealing for witnesses to the murder… the Merchiston area of Edinburgh.” He turned the television off.

He didn’t have any books with him, nor his laptop, of course, so he could neither read nor write. Martin hadn’t realized how much of his life was taken up by these two activities. How would he manage if he became blind or deaf? Or both? At least if he was blind he could get a guide dog-there was an upside to every-thing, a silver lining of helpful Labs and noble German shepherds eager to be his eyes. They had dogs for the deaf too, but Martin wasn’t sure what they did. Tugged at your sleeve a lot, probably, while looking meaningfully at things.

His phone chirruped, and he listened to the rich Dublin tones of his agent. “Are you dead, Martin,” she asked, “or not dead? Only I wish you’d make up your mind, because I’m fielding a lot of questions here.”

“Not dead,” Martin said. “It said on the television news that I’m a recluse. Why would they say that? I’m not reclusive, I’m not a recluse.”

“Well, you don’t have a lot of friends, Martin.” Melanie dropped her voice as if there were other people in the room with her and said, “Did you kill him, Martin? Did you kill Richard Mott? I know we always say that no publicity is bad publicity, but murder’s a line you can’t really cross. You know what I’m saying?”

“Why on earth would I kill Richard Mott? What would make you think that?”

“Where were you when he died?” Melanie asked.

“In a hotel,” Martin said.

“With a woman?” she said, sounding surprised.

“No, with a man.”Whichever way he said it, it wasn’t going to sound right. He couldn’t imagine what she would say if he told her about the gun. The gun had become a guilty secret he was carrying around with him. He should have just told the police, brazened out their incredulity, but spending the night with an armed assassin didn’t seem like a very good alibi.

“Jesus,” Melanie said. “Do you have a lawyer, Martin?” She let pass what she obviously thought was a decent interval and then said, “How’s the book going, anyway?”

Did she honestly think he was writing while all this was going on? Someone, someone he knew, had been murdered in his house. There were lumps of brain matter on his coffee table.

“An antidote,” she said, “art can be an antidote to life.”

Nina Riley was hardly art. “This is pretty spiffing, Bertie, we should think about taking a cruise more often. Now all we have to do is prove that our cat burglar is Maud Elphinstone and that the name on her birth certifi-cate is Malcolm Elphinstone.” It was, let’s face it, crap. “Are you still there, Martin? You know you’ve got the Book Festival tomorrow, so you have. Do you want me to come up and give you moral support?”

“No, I don’t. I’m going to cancel.”

“There’ll be a lot of interest.”

“That’s why I’m canceling.” He put the phone down and returned to staring at the ceiling.

Martin was running on empty, he had eaten nothing since yesterday, apart from the packet of Minstrels he had shared with Clare in the police car. He had spent a large part of the day feeling sick and nauseous for one reason or another-the lurid hangover of earlier this morning, the blood and gore besmirching his lovely house, the sight of Richard Mott’s zombie face-but now he felt suddenly ravenous. He would have liked a proper high tea- poached orange-yolked eggs on hot, buttery toast. And on the table a big china pot of tea and a cake shaped like a drum-a cherry Genoa or a frosted walnut. And his wife, quietly knitting in a corner somewhere.

He might have been in a different room at the Four Clans, but the “minibar” was still devoid of anything edible. The sight of a can of Irn-Bru lurking in its innards made his stomach turn. He wanted to go home. He wanted to go to his house and crawl into his own bed and pull the covers over his head and make it all go away, but it would never go away because this was his punishment. And his punishment wouldn’t be finished until his entire life had been dismantled and all the little pieces of it had been fed through a mangle until they were flat, and no one would ever be able to put him back together again. One minute he was a full-fledged member of society, and with a tick of the clock, a turn of the screw, he had become an outcast. It took only the littlest thing. The arc inscribed by the baseball bat, a bowl of borscht, and a girl unwrapping her hair.

A beautiful girl with blond hair wanted to meet him (Marty) in the Caviar Bar of the Grand Hotel Europe. He wondered if, being a foreigner, she found something attractive in his hesitant, stuttering Britishness, if instead of dullness she saw reticent charm.

He had taken the grocer to the Grand Hotel Europe for afternoon tea, but the man had made a great performance of examining the little sandwiches and cakes and saying, “You don’t get much for your money, do you?” as if he were paying, not Martin. There were a lot of girls around, very well-dressed Russian girls, and the dying gro-cer raised his eyebrows at Martin and nodded his head in the direc-tion of one of them and said, “We know what they are, don’t we?” and Martin said, “Do we?” The grocer snorted at what he saw as Martin’s ignorance and made a face. “St. Petersburg brides,” he said and laughed. A flake of smoked salmon had adhered to one of his fleshy lips. Martin wondered what was the point of anything. Being with the grocer was like being with a walking, talking memento mori. “No, really,” Martin said earnestly to him, “I think they’re just attractive young women, I don’t think they’re…you know.”