One Good Turn

“Favors,” Jackson said pleasantly, “that’s a nice name.”

“It’s a cleaning agency,” the mean-faced woman said without looking at him.

“I wondered,” Jackson said, “if you had the address for your office. I haven’t been able to find it anywhere.”

She looked at him suspiciously. “Why would you want it?”

“Oh, you know,” Jackson said, “just to go in and have a chat, about getting the cleaners in.” It sounded even more like Mob-speak when you put it like that.

“Everything is done on the phone,” the Housekeeper said. She looked as if she breakfasted on lemons-“thrawn-faced,” his father would have called her-but she had an accent as soft as Scotch mist.

“Everything on the phone?” Jackson asked. “How do you get new business?”

“Word of mouth. Personal recommendations.”

A sallow young woman, built like a peasant and radiating hostility, came out of the nearest house and, without a word, picked up the buckets and mops and carried them inside.

“I’ll be back to pick you up in two hours!” the Housekeeper shouted after her, and then she got into the van and drove off without giving Jackson a second look.

Jackson loped off in the opposite direction, trying to look insouciant in case the Housekeeper was watching him in her rearview mirror. When the pink van was out of sight, he doubled back and entered the house through the front door. He could hear the sounds of ru

He decided to target the one in the kitchen. Slow down, Jackson, he said to himself, you’re not in a potential threat situation here. Armyspeak. The army felt so long ago now, yet it remained like a pattern in him. Sometimes he wondered what would have happened to him if his father had let him go down the pit instead of joining up. Every aspect of his life would have been different, he himself would have been a different man. He would be on the scrap heap now, of course, redundant, unwanted. But wasn’t that what he was now?

In 1995, he remembered the year, remembered the moment, he had been at home in Cambridge, when his wife was still his wife, not an ex, and he was a policeman and she was hugely pregnant with Marlee (Jackson imagined their baby tightly packed like the heart of a cabbage inside his wife), and Jackson was washing up after di

And then they got a baby and a dishwasher, and Jackson con-tinued on and didn’t think again for a long time about the path he hadn’t chosen, a way of life that had never been, yet that didn’t stop him from aching for it in some confused place in his soul.

His target maid was at the sink too, wringing out a cloth and vig-orously wiping the draining board back and forth, back and forth. No crucifixion ears as far as he could see, although she had her back to him and was singing along to the radio in a foreign accent. There was so much background noise in the house that Jackson was unsure how to proceed without startling her. He was struck by three things: one-she wasn’t the peasanty one that the Housekeeper had barked at, and two-she had a great behind, made greater by the tight skirt of the pink uniform. “Two hard-boiled eggs in a handkerchief,” his brother used to say. His brother had been a co

Jackson had spent half his life in uniform without thinking much about it beyond that it made getting up in the morning eas-ier when you didn’t have to make a choice about what to wear, so the effect a woman in uniform could have always struck him as curious. Not all uniforms, obviously, not Nazis, di

He never really got the third thought to the front of his brain because the woman in this particular uniform caught sight of him at that moment and reached into the dishwasher, plucked a big di

“University discus champion,” she said without any apparent remorse for having nearly decapitated him. “Why are you creeping?”

“I’m not creeping, I was looking for someone to clean my flat,” Jackson said, trying to sound like a helpless male (“Shouldn’t be too hard,” he heard Josie’s voice say in his head). “I saw the van and…”

“We’re not called cleaners. We’re called maids.” She relented a little. “I’m sorry, I’m nervous.” She sat down at the table and pushed her hands through her hair, her hands were red and raw with some kind of dermatitis. She said, “This morning, Sophia, a maid, a friend, found a man who was murdered in a house we go to. Was terrible,” the foreign girl said mournfully.

“I’m sure it was,” Jackson said.

“We’re not paid enough for that.”

Money. Always a good starting point, in Jackson’s experience. He removed five twenty-pound notes from his wallet and placed them on the table. “What’s your name?” he said to the girl.

“Marijut.”

“Okay, Marijut,” Jackson said, flicking the switch on the elec-tric kettle, “how about a nice cup of tea?”

“A young woman,” Jackson repeated patiently, “I want to know if she’s on your books.”There was a listless air in the offices of Fa-vors. The girl in charge, who seemed to be the only person in the building, spoke a poor kind of English and seemed to want will-fully to misunderstand everything Jackson said to her. He automatically converted to a kind of simplistic pidgin because deep in his atavistic native soul he believed that foreigners couldn’t be flu-ent in English, whereas, of course, it was the English who were incapable of speaking foreign languages. “Ears? Crosses?” he said loudly.

The office was in a neglected cobbled close off the Royal Mile.