“I don’t think so,” Sophia said. “It’s just a novel.” But she was quite relieved when she heard him thundering up the stairs to Greg’s flat. At least now she could kick her shoes off and get a glass of wine. She remembered the writer’s house, how it was before the terrible thing happened in it. She could almost smell the roses in his hallway.

56

The body washed up a second time at Cramond, as if the girl were determined to come back again and again to the same place until someone took notice of her. The pathologist at the scene thought she might have been strangled (“Postmortem lividity on the neck”), but they would have to wait for the postmortem to know anything more certain. Three days in the waters of the Forth surfing up and down the coastline hadn’t done her any favors. Not quite Ophelia, washed down the stream, garlanded with flowers.

Cramond was under the flight path for Edinburgh Airport, and Louise wondered what they looked like from the air, little spiders scurrying around with no purpose, or a well-drilled army of ants working together? From the single policeman who had responded to the call, the number of people had expanded exponentially in the course of an hour. Her team, her case. Her first murder. They had found Hatter’s car parked in the long-stay car park at Edinburgh Airport, Jackson had been right, the boot was swarming with DNA, hopefully they would find matches to their corpse. Sooner or later they would find Graham Hatter.

They took the body away in a police launch, but both the procurator fiscal and the pathologist elected to fly in the helicop-ter. Louise went on the boat with the body, like an honor guard. She touched the thick plastic of the body bag.

“Hello, Lena,” she whispered. She had been Jackson’s girl all this time, now she belonged to her. She dialed his number. There were all kinds of things she would have liked to say to him, but in the end, when he answered, all she said was, “We found her. We found your girl.”

57

When they landed at the airport in Geneva, they took a taxi straight to the bank.

Inside the cool interior, Tatiana spoke to a woman at a recep-tion desk. “This is Mrs. Gloria Hatter, she is here to withdraw funds.” Gloria supposed that people who worked in Swiss banks probably spoke English better than the English did. She could have sworn that Tatiana didn’t sound as Russian as she had before.

The receptionist picked up a phone and murmured something discreet and French into it, and within seconds they were ushered into the plush interior of a private room.

“Nice bank,”Tatiana said appreciatively.

Half an hour later they were outside again in the sunshine. It was that easy. Tatiana had instructed Gloria to arrange for the money to be handed over in the form of high-value bearer bonds. The bearer bonds seemed rather flimsy to Gloria, she would have preferred the weighty reality of cash. “Loot,” Tatiana said and laughed.

They went to an old, expensive grand café, and Gloria divided the bonds between them. “One for you, one for me,”she said. Tatiana tucked hers into her bra, and Gloria followed suit. Then Gloria turned her phone back on and listened to the messages on her voice mail. There was a message from the security company man wondering where she was and why her house was wrapped in crime-scene tape. There was a message from Emily, who seemed irritated by the imminence of the Second Coming. There was a message from the hospital. Gloria took a second phone out of her handbag and listened to the one message it contained, it was an announcement she had been expecting since Tuesday, and it confirmed the message from the hospital.

It was a momentous and final thing.

“Graham’s dead,” she said, but she was speaking to herself. Tatiana had gone.

Gloria took her time over her coffee. She had a very nice slice of Eglantine torte with it, and when she paid she left a very good tip. She remembered that it was Friday, Beryl’s day, and wondered if her ancient mother-in-law would notice that she wasn’t there.

Out in the street she pushed the second phone deep into the first waste bin she came to. She was sure it would be emptied soon, the Swiss being so famous for their cleanliness. What she had seen of the country so far was very appealing. She imagined buying a little dark-wood chalet in the countryside, window boxes full of trailing geraniums in the summer, crisp white snow piled on the roof in winter. A basket of kittens sleeping by a log-burning stove.

There was so much work to be done. She would move through the world righting wrong. Legions of kittens, horses, budgies, mangled boys, murdered girls, they were all calling to her. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

She would be feared by the bad. She would be a legend in her own lifetime. She would be cosmic justice. That should definitely be said with capital letters. Cosmic Justice. Incontrovertibly and without argument, Cosmic Justice was a Good Thing.

58

Jackson had got as far as Scotch Corner before he turned round and headed back north. He found that he couldn’t, after all, just drive off into the sunset. Martin had asked him to help him, and he had said yes. The guy had saved his life and needed him to tes-tify on his behalf, and it wasn’t possible to just walk away from that.

The Angel of the North came back into view, holding his rust-red airplane wings above the land like a great protector. Jackson had slipped from the righteous path, but it was okay, he was back on it now.

59

He didn’t need the gun, as it turned out. The only explanation he could come up with for its disappearance was that Martin had taken it when they were in the hotel room together, before he slipped him the Mickey Finn. He should have checked that it was there before he left the hotel. That was a mistake. There was no room for mistakes in his career. Maybe it was time for him to do something else, go in a different direction, do that OU degree, start an ostrich farm, run a B and B.

When he had eventually opened up his bag, there was a Gideon Bible inside instead of the gun. The golfing trophy lay innocently on top, looking slightly skewed out of its original position so you knew the little chrome golfer was never going to be able to hit the ball straight. Ray had played golf a few times, had quite liked it, the force of the drive, the precision of the putting. It had appealed to both sides of his natural skills. He’d picked up the trophy in a charity shop. Some starving kid somewhere in the world benefiting by a penny from some old geezer’s golf trophy. R. J. Hudson. You had to wonder about him, who he was, what was his life? The trophy was dated 1938. Had R. J. Hudson fought in the war, had he died in the war? Or had he outlived everyone he knew and died alone? Would that happen to himself? No. He’d blow his own brains out first. Do as you would be done by.

You could imagine it happening to Martin, though. Ray expe-rienced an unexpected twinge of fondness for Martin. He had told him way too much about himself. Anything was too much, even nothing was too much. By the time Ray had returned to the Four Clans to look for him, to ask him about the gun, Martin had gone. He’d like to kill him for messing him about like that, but then the guy saved his life, so he owed him. A life for a life.

A gun would be too obvious in this place, and unnecessary con-sidering that all he had to do was reach over and flick a switch. Basically, he could just turn the guy off. God knows what he was hooked up to, it looked like only the machines were standing between him and eternity. He could probably just let nature take its course, but better to be safe than sorry, as they say. And anyway, he’d been paid to do a job, so do the job he would.