“What about the other two women? Gloria Hatter and Tatiana.”

“Gone. Did a bunk. Like you. Mrs. Hatter’s wanted by the fraud boys. And Graham Hatter seems to have disappeared off the face of the planet. Everyone’s very agitated by this case.”

“You’re running it, then?” he asked. “Your first murder?” It sounded odd, like a child’s primer.

“No.” She was silent for a while, like a criminal weighing up the options of confessing. “Actually.”

“Actually?”

“I had to leave as well. Personal stuff.”

He tried hard to remember her son’s name. He made a stab at “Archie?”

“No. My cat.”

He didn’t respond to that in case he said the wrong thing (he’d learned something from being with Julia for two years). “So four peo-ple left the scene of the crime?” he puzzled. “That must be a record.”

“It’s not funny.”

“I didn’t say it was.”

“An astonishing thing happened that I thought you’d like to know about.”

“Astonishing things happen all the time,” Jackson said. “We just don’t notice.”

“Oh, please. You’ll be telling me you believe in angels next and everything that happens is meant. They got Terence Smith for Richard Mott’s murder.”

“Everything that happens is meant.”

“You don’t sound as surprised as I would have liked.”

“I’m surprised, trust me.” He wasn’t, he had received a phone call, no more than a murmur in his ear, a murmur with a Russian accent. He had no idea how, but Tatiana seemed to know everything. He wondered-if you had sex with her, would she kill you afterward? He thought there was a possibility that it might just be worth it.

“Jackson?”

“Yeah.”

“Your Terence Smith was a one-man crime wave.”

“He wasn’t mine.”

“He was also your basic moron, left trace evidence everywhere. The tech boys got bits of Richard Mott’s blood and brain matter from the baseball bat. He had Mott’s phone in his pocket, and when they searched his flat they found Martin Canning’s laptop, which is where he got his address from, I suppose. So it looks like he killed Mott by mistake, that he might really have been looking for Canning after all. Revenge for throwing his briefcase at him, I suppose, but he got Richard Mott instead. Who knows.”

“This is all very neat,” Jackson said.

“Well, not that neat. We still haven’t found anything to connect him to your nonexistent dead girl, nothing in his flat or in the Honda.”

“She exists, believe me. Terence Smith killed her on Graham Hatter’s orders. He used Hatter’s car to dispose of her-find that, and you’ll find the evidence. Hatter’s probably sipping cocktails with Lord Lucan now in South Africa or wherever murderers on the lam hide out these days.”

“And this is all on the word of a Russian call girl who no one except you has ever met. Oh, and Gloria Hatter. Who is also on the lam, as you put it. There is nothing to link either Terence Smith or Graham Hatter to the girl. A girl who, I should emphasize, no one has missed.”

“I know people who miss her,”Jackson said. “She was named Lena Mikhailichenko. She was twenty-five years old. She was born in Kiev. Her mother still lives there. She was an accountant back in Russia. She was a Virgo, she liked disco, rock, and classical music. She read newspapers and crime novels. She had long blond hair and weighed 122 pounds and was five foot five inches tall, she was a Christian. She was good-natured, kind, thoughtful, and optimistic, they all say opti-mistic. She liked to read and go to the theater, she also liked going to the gym and swimming, and she had a completely misplaced ‘confi-dence in tomorrows,’ so perhaps her English wasn’t as good as she claims. I think that’s another way of saying ‘optimistic’ again. And parks. They all like parks, in fact they all say more or less the same thing. You can see a picture of her at www.bestrussianbrides.com, where she’s still up for sale although she left Russia six months ago to see if Edinburgh’s pavements were paved with gold. That was when she fell in with Favors and met her nemesis in the shape of Graham Hatter. I think if you look you might find that our Mr. Hatter was involved with Favors, as well as God knows what else.”

“You don’t give up, do you? You have to come back.”

“No.”

“Jesus, Jackson.”

“No. I’m tired of being involved. I’m tired of being a witness.”

“Martin needs you to give evidence on his behalf, he killed someone. He saved your life. He’s your friend.”

“He’s not my friend.” There was a long pause. The Supremes asked him to stop in the name of love. “Anyway,” he said.

“Anyway.”

“Well, don’t forget,” Jackson said, “we’ll always have Paris.”

“We never had Paris.”

“Well, not yet,” Jackson said. “Not yet.”

55

Sophia’s Scottish boyfriend pounced on her as she came through the door, tugging on the zip at the front of her pink uniform. He found the pink uniforms vaguely pornographic, as if Barbie had de-signed her ideal nurse’s uniform. Sophia wore hers very short, and he often wondered if there were men in the houses she went to who spent their time trying to get a glance up her skirt as she bent over or reached up. When he thought of her at work, feather dusters tended to be involved as well as leaning provocatively across beds or kneeling on floors to scrub them with her pert Czech arse in the air.

“Wait,” she said, pushing him away.

“Can’t,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about this moment all day.”

She wanted to take her jacket off, have a glass of red wine, eat beans on toast, wash her face, put her feet up, do a hundred things that were higher up on her list of priorities. She’d had to work an extra hour today. “New practices,” the Housekeeper told them. The Housekeeper was new too, the mean-faced Scottish House-keeper had disappeared overnight, and now they had a tetchy Mus-covite bitch in her place. Favors was “under new management.” Sophia didn’t think much of the new regime. She thought it might be time to stop working, go home to Prague, take up her real life again. She imagined herself in the future, a top international sci-entist, living in the States, handsome husband, a couple of kids, imagined looking through the photographs that recorded her stay in Scotland-the Castle, the Tattoo, hills and lochs. She might remove the photographs of her Scottish boyfriend so that her Amer-ican husband didn’t feel jealous. On the other hand, she might not.

“Come on,” her Scottish boyfriend moaned at her, tugging at her clothes. Sometimes when he was in the mood there was just no putting him off.

It was when he was pushing her pink uniform up around her hips that she felt something uncomfortable sticking into her back and said, “Hang on,” to him so that he groaned and rolled over on his back, his big pale Scottish penis sticking in the air like a flag-pole. She had nothing to compare it with, this being her first Celt, but she liked to imagine that this was what all Scotsmen were hiding under their kilts-even though the other maids shrieked with more knowledgeable laughter when she said this.

She found the source of her discomfort in one of the pockets of her jacket. The doll. One of the writer’s matryoshka. She had a vague memory of picking it up amid the horror of his house. It was a small one, although not the baby. She opened it, pulling it apart. Like an egg, there was a secret inside. She frowned at it.

“Sony Memory Stick,” her Scottish boyfriend said. “For a computer.”

“I know,” she said. Sometimes he forgot that she was a scientist from a sophisticated European capital city, sometimes he behaved as if she farmed potatoes back in the Middle Ages. The Memory Stick had a label on it. Death on the Black Isle.

“Greg upstairs has a Sony,” he said enthusiastically, his flagpole already limp and forgotten. He liked everything to do with comput-ers. “We can see what’s on it. It must be important if it was hidden.”