Jackson didn’t remember his sister’s funeral because he hadn’t attended it, staying with a neighbor instead. Mrs. Judd. It was a long time since he’d thought about Mrs. Judd, the sooty smell of her back parlor with its overstuffed cut moquette, the gold eyetooth that gave her a slightly rakish, gypsy air although there had been nothing unconventional in a life that had been defined by the pit-daughter of a miner, wife of a miner, mother of a miner.
Jackson was all dressed, ready to go to Niamh’s funeral, he could recall the black suit he was wearing, made from a cheap, felty ma-terial, he’d never seen it before and never saw it again, but when it came time to go, he simply couldn’t, shaking his head mutely when his father said, “Best get going, son.” Francis said gruffly, “Come on, Jackson, you’ll be sorry if you don’t come and say good-bye to her proper-like,” but Jackson had never regretted not going to that terrible funeral. Francis was right, though, he had never properly said good-bye to Niamh.
He was twelve years old and had never worn a suit before, and it would be years before he wore one again-Francis’s funeral hadn’t merited one, apparently-and all he remembered about that day was wearing someone else’s ill-fitting suit and sitting at Mrs. Judd’s little kitchen table with its worn Formica, dotted with cigarette burns, and drinking sweet tea and eating a Birds Eye chicken pie. Funny the things you remembered. “Bertie, this was no accident, this was murder!”
He had expected someone to come up to him in the coffee shop and ask him with a sarcastic sneer if he was intending to buy the book or just sit there all day and read it for free, but then he realized that no one cared and he could indeed have sat there all day, with a sickly latte and an even more sickly blueberry muffin, and read Alex Blake’s entire oeuvre without paying, if he so wished. Nobody worked and the books were free.
Jackson didn’t read much fiction, never had, just the occasional spy or thriller thing on holiday. He preferred factual books, they gave him the feeling that he was learning something, even if he forgot it almost immediately. He wasn’t really sure he saw the point of novels, he didn’t go around saying that, because then people thought you were a philistine. Maybe he was a philistine. Julia was a great reader, she always had a novel on the go, but then her whole professional life was based on fictions of one kind or another, whereas his whole professional life had been based on fact.
He wasn’t much better with art. All that fuzzy Impressionism didn’t do it for him, he’d looked at endless water lilies and thought, What’s the point? And religious paintings made him feel as if he were in a Catholic church. He liked representational art, pictures that told a story. He liked Vermeer, all those cool interi-ors spoke of an ordinariness he could relate to, a moment in time captured forever, because life wasn’t about legions of Madonnas and water lilies, it was about the commonplace of details-the woman pouring milk from a jug, the boy sitting at the kitchen table, eating a chicken pie.
You could tell Tarvit was an arrogant prick, and E. M. Heller (what kind of a name was that?) was just plain odd, she was either a badly put-together woman or she was a man in drag. Trans-vestism was a mystery to Jackson, he had never in his life worn a single item of female clothing, apart from once borrowing a cash-mere scarf from Julia when they were going for a walk and being troubled all afternoon by its perfumed softness around his neck. Martin seemed blithely unaware of the signals that E. M. Heller was sending his way. The guy definitely had a look of celibacy about him, he reminded Jackson of a vicar or a monk. E. M.- Eustacia Marguerite or Edward Malcolm? Whichever, E. M. was going to have her work cut out with Martin.
Jackson felt faintly ludicrous, standing like a Secret Service agent behind Martin in the “Signing Tent” (he had originally mis-read it as the “Singing Tent”-an idea that had both alarmed and confused him). The Book Festival was a jamboree of tents and reminded him vaguely of an army field camp. He had a sudden flashback to the smell of the big top last night, the familiar scent of grass under canvas. The crazy Russian girl like a bandit queen, with her knife at his throat.
Martin glanced up nervously as each new person approached him, as if he were waiting for an unknown assassin. Jackson didn’t understand why he was doing the event if he was so worried. “I’m not going to hide away,” Martin said. “You have to face the thing you’re afraid of.” In Jackson’s experience it was often best to avoid the thing you were afraid of. Discretion really was sometimes the better part of valor.
“But at the same time you’re worried that someone’s after you? The person who stole Richard Mott’s phone, the person who broke into your office?”
“No, that’s not who’s after me,” Martin said. “Cosmic justice is after me.”
“Cosmic justice?” Martin made it sound like a person, an out-rider for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
“I committed a crime,” Martin said. “And now I must be punished. An eye for an eye.”
Jackson tried to be encouraging. “Come on now, Martin, wasn’t it Gandhi who said, ‘An eye for an eye and the whole world will be blind’?”Something like that, anyway. He had seen it on a T-shirt once, at a CND demonstration he’d policed in the eighties. Last year Julia made him go on an antiwar march. That was how far his world had turned around.
“I’m sorry,” Martin said. “It’s very good of you to do this.”
Jackson didn’t mind, it had all the trappings of a job, and he was doing something rather than just hanging around (although it felt very like hanging around). Close-up and personal wasn’t really his thing, but he had done bodyguard detail in his time, knew the drill.
“Nothing’s going to happen to you on my watch, Martin,” he reassured him. Moviespeak that seemed to make Martin happy.
Jackson wondered what “crime” Martin had committed. Parking in a bus bay? Writing crap novels?
Martin was doing well, politely signing and smiling. Jackson gave him a thumbs-up sign of encouragement. Then he turned around, and there she was, standing next to him.
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “Would you not do that?”
He looked for the knife, just because he couldn’t see it didn’t mean that she didn’t have it. In a previous life, under a previous regime, he expected she would have been a spy (or, indeed, an assassin). Maybe she still was.
“So, crazy Russian girl,” he said, “how’s it going?”
She ignored him and, without any preamble, handed him a photograph. The photograph showed a girl standing against a sea-wall somewhere. “Day trip to St. Andrews,” the crazy Russian girl said. He couldn’t keep on calling her that. She had said-what had she said? “Ask for Jojo.” That sounded pretty unlikely. A working girl’s name. “What’s your real name?” he said to her. Real names had always seemed important to Jackson. “My name’s Jackson Brodie.”
She shrugged and said, “Tatiana. Is not secret.”
“Tatiana?” Jackson wondered if that was like “Titania.” He had seen production photographs of Julia playing the queen of the fairies in a drama-school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, barefoot, almost naked, her astonishing hair let loose and garlanded with flowers. A wild girl. He wished he had known her then.
“Yes, Tatiana.”
“And the girl in the photograph?”
“Lena. She is twenty-five.” It was sunny in the photograph and the wind was blowing the girl’s hair around, tiny crucifixes just visible in her ears. His mermaid. She looked remarkably like Ta-tiana, except that her eyes were kinder. “Everyone says we look like sisters,”Tatiana said.
Tatiana had no grasp of the past tense, Jackson realized. It kept the dead girl in a present she no longer had a place in. He thought of all the other photographs of dead girls he had looked at in his time and felt the leaden weight of melancholy drop again. Josie had album after album of photographs documenting Marlee’s existence from the moment of her birth. One day they would all be dust, or perhaps someone would find one in a flea market or a garage sale or whatever they would have in the future and feel the same sadness for an unknown, forgotten life. Tatiana nudged him in his bruised ribs with a sharp elbow and hissed, “Pay attention.”