One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson Sample Chapter

8/3/2019 One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson Sample Chapter

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What the critics wrote about

One Good Turn

An absolute joy to read . . . the pleasure of One Good Turn lies

in the ride, in Atkinsons wry, unvanquished characters, her

swooping, savvy, sarcastic prose and authorial joie de vivre

Guardian

Atkinsons bright voice rings on every page, and her sly and wry

observations move the plot as swiftly as suspense turns thepages of a thriller

San Francisco Chronicle

It doesnt really matter in which genre Atkinson chooses to write.

Her subject is always the irrecoverable loss of love and how best

to continue living once you have glumly recognized that That waswhat the world was like, things improved but they didnt get better.

Her gift is in presenting this unnerving and subversive philosophy

as a dazzling form of entertainment

Sunday Times

A remarkable feat of storytelling bravadoWashington Post

Copyright KATE ATKINSON 2011. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, storedin a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.


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Thrillingly addictive . . . In One Good Turn Atkinson proves quite

unique in her ability to fuse emotional drama and thriller . . . Imagine

a Richard Curtis film scripted by Raymond Chandler, both a little

enlivened by the collaboration . . . The mix is embodied by Brodie.

Like all good detectives, he is a hero for men and women alike

The Times

Atkinson is frequently very funny, while the tone stays light

the plot continues to darken . . . manages to be that rarest

of things a good literary novel and a cracking holiday read

Observer

An extraordinary tapestry that is both hilarious, poignant and

unexpected . . . Atkinson at her peak: full of wit, surprises and

humanity. Not to be missed

Sunday Express

High suspense and rattling pace . . . charged with adrenalin anda spry humour

Financial Times

Whatever she does is done to the highest of literary standards. She

has produced an engrossing, enjoyable, complex novel packed with

intriguing characters, vividly imagined scenes and a compelling plotTimes Literary Supplement




4/17

One story nests within another, like the set of Russian dolls that

Martin owns . . . Kate Atkinson has that priceless Ancient Mariner

ability that keeps the reader turning the pages

Spectator

Kate Atkinson is an absolute must-read. I love everything she writes

Harlan Coben

While Kate Atkinson could give a masterclass on creating believable

and intriguing characters, she also knows more than a thing or two

about plotting . . . another class act

Mirror

Deft and funny prose sums up each character sharply and

endearingly . . . blends humour with page-turning action . . .

masterfully controlled

Time Out London

Compelling and always entertaining . . . piercing, lucid and perceptive

USA Today

A detective novel packed with more wit, insight and subtlety than

an entire shelf-full of literary fictionMarie Claire




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Also by

KATE

ATKINSON

Behind the Scenesat the Museum

A surprising, tragicomic and subversive family saga

set in York, Kate Atkinsons prizewinning first novel,

like all her novels, has a mystery at its heart.

Little short of a masterpiece

Daily Mail

Human CroquetA multilayered, moving novel about the forest

of Arden, a girl who drops in and out of time,

and the heartrending mystery of a lost mother.

Brilliant and engrossing

Penelope Fitzgerald

Emotionally Weird

Set in Dundee, this clever, comic novel depicts student lifein all its wild chaos, and a girls poignant quest for her father.

Achingly funny . . . executed with wit and mischief

Meera Syal




6/17

Not the End of the WorldKate Atkinsons first collection of short

stories playful and profound.

Moving and funny, and crammed with incidental wisdom

Sunday Times

Also featuring Jackson Brodie:

Case HistoriesThe first novel to feature Jackson Brodie, the former police detective,

who finds himself investigating three separate cold murder cases in

Cambridge, while still haunted by a tragedy in his own past.

The best mystery of the decade

Stephen King

When There Be Good News?A six-year-old girl witnesses an appalling crime.

Thirty years later, Jackson Brodie is on a fatal journey

that will hurtle him into its aftermath.

Genius . . . insightful, often funny, life-affirming

Sunday Telegraph

Will

Started Early, Took My DogJackson Brodie returns to Yorkshire, his home county, in

search of someone elses roots, while security chief TracyWaterhouse makes an impulse purchase that will replace the

tedium of everyday life with fear and danger.2

The best British crime novel of the year

Heat




7/17

ONE GOOD TURN

A Jolly Murder Mystery

Kate Atkinson

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CHAPTER

BLACK SWAN




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TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS61-63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA

A Random House Group Company

ONE GOOD TURN

First published in Great Britainin 2006 by Doubleday

an imprint of Transworld PublishersBlack Swan edition published 2007

CopyrightKate Atkinson 2006

The author and publishers are grateful to the Society of Authors as theLiterary Representative of the Estate of Laurence Binyon, for permission to

reproduce short extracts from Binyons poem For the Fallen(September 1914)

Kate Atkinson has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs andPatents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, anyresemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this bookis available from the British Library.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out,

or otherwise circulated without the publishers priorconsent in any form of binding or cover other than that

in which it is published and without a similar condition,including this condition, being imposed on the

subsequent purchaser.

Addresses for Random House Group Ltd companies outside the UKcan be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk The Random House Group Ltd R No. 954009

Typeset in 11/15pt Giovanni Book byFalcon Oast Graphic Art Ltd.

Printed in the UK by CPI Cox & Wyman, Reading, RG1 8EX.

A BLACK SWAN BOOK: 9780552777872

The Random House Group Limited supports The Forest StewardshipCouncil (FSC), the leading international forest certification organisation.All our titles that are printed on Greenpeace approved FSC certified paper

carry the FSC logo. Our paper procurement policy can be found at:www.randomhouse.co.uk/environment

eg.

www.transworldbooks.co.uk

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Black Swan edition reissued 2011




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For Debbie, Glynis, Judith, Lynn, Penny,Sheila and Tessa.

For the way we were and for the way we are.

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I owe a debt of gratitude to Martin Auld, Malcolm R.

Dickson (Assistant Inspector of Constabulary for

Scotland), Russell Equi, Major Michael Keech, Sheriff

Andrew Lothian, Dr Doug Lyle and Dr Anthony Toft fortelling me things they knew and I didnt. Apologies if I

have misunderstood that information or, occasionally,

wilfully misused or distorted it.

Thank you to David Robinson and Donald Ross at

the Scotsman, to Reagan Arthur, to Kim Witherspoon

and to Peter Strauss and to Little Brown, US, andTransworld, UK.

Thank you also to David Lindgren for trying, and

usually failing, to explain corporate law to me and,

more importantly, for being a lawyer who lunches.

Thanks also to Alan Stalker and Stephen Cotton for

coming to the rescue in hard times.Last but not least, thank you to the writer Ray Allan

for graciously allowing me to steal a story from his life.

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Male parta, male dilabuntur.

(What is dishonourably got is dishonourably

squandered.)(Cicero, Philippics, II, 27)

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Tuesday

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1

HE WAS LOST. HE WASNT USED TO BEING LOST. HE WAS

the kind of man who drew up plans and then

executed them efficiently, but now everything

was conspiring against him in ways he decided he

couldnt have foreseen. He had been stuck in a jam onthe A1 for two mind-numbing hours so that it was

already past the middle of the morning when he arrived

in Edinburgh. Then hed gone adrift on a one-way

system and been thwarted by a road closed because of a

burst water main. It had been raining, steadily and

unforgivingly, on the drive north and had only begun toease off as he hit the outskirts of town. The rain had in no

way deterred the crowds it had never occurred to him

that Edinburgh was in the middle of the Festival and that

there would be carnival hordes of people milling around

as if the end of a war had just been declared. The closest

he had previously got to the Edinburgh Festival wasaccidentally turning on Late Night Review and seeing a

bunch of middle-class wankers discussing some

pretentious piece of fringe theatre.

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He ended up in the dirty heart of the city, in a street

that somehow seemed to be on a lower level than the

rest of the town, a blackened urban ravine. The rain had

left the cobbles slick and greasy and he had to drive

cautiously because the street was teeming with people,

haphazardly crossing over or standing in little knots in

the middle of the road, as if no one had told them that

roads were for cars and pavements were for pedestrians.

A queue snaked the length of the street people waiting

to get into what looked like a bomb hole in the wall but

which announced itself, on a large placard outside the

door, as Fringe Venue 164.

The name on the driving licence in his wallet was

Paul Bradley. Paul Bradley was a nicely forgettable

name. He was several degrees of separation away fromhis real name now, a name that no longer felt as if it had

ever belonged to him. When he wasnt working he often

(but not always) went by the name Ray. Nice and

simple. Ray of light, Ray of darkness. Ray of sunshine,

Ray of night. He liked slipping between identities,

sliding through the cracks. The rental Peugeot he wasdriving felt just right, not a flashy macho machine but

the kind of car an ordinary guy would drive. An

ordinary guy like Paul Bradley. If anyone asked him

what he did, what Paul Bradley did, he would say,

Boring stuff. Im just a desk jockey, pushing papers

around in an accounts department.He was trying to drive and at the same time decipher

his AZ of Edinburgh to work out how to escape from

this hellish street when someone stepped in front of the

ONE GOOD TURN

18Copyright KATE ATKINSON 2011. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, storedin a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,



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car. It was a type he loathed a young dark-haired guy

with thick, black-framed spectacles, two days of stubble

and a fag hanging out of his mouth, there were

hundreds of them in London, all trying to look like

French existentialists from the Sixties. Hed bet that not

one of them had ever opened a book on philosophy.

Hed read the lot, Plato, Kant, Hegel, even thought

about one day doing a degree.

He braked hard and didnt hit the spectacles guy, just

made him give a little jump, like a bullfighter avoiding

the bull. The guy was furious, waving his fag around,

shouting, raising a finger to him. Charmless, devoid of

manners were his parents proud of the job theyd

done? He hated smoking, it was a disgusting habit,

hated guys who gave you the finger and screamed, Spinon it!, saliva flying out of their filthy, nicotine-stained

mouths.

He felt the bump, about the same force as hitting a

badger or a fox on a dark night, except it came from

behind, pushing him forward. It was just as well the

spectacles guy had performed his little paso doble andgot out of the way or he would have been pancaked. He

looked in the rear-view mirror. A blue Honda Civic, the

driver climbing out big guy, slabs of weightlifter

muscle, gym-fit rather than survival-fit, he wouldnt

have been able to last three months in the jungle or the

desert the way that Ray could have done. He wouldnthave lasted a day. He was wearing driving gloves, ugly

black leather ones with knuckle holes. He had a dog in

the back of the car, a beefy Rottweiler, exactly the dog

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you would have guessed a guy like that would have. The

guy was a walking clich. The dog was having a seizure

in the back, spraying saliva all over the window, its

claws scrabbling on the glass. The dog didnt worry him

too much. He knew how to kill dogs.

Ray got out of the car and walked round to the back

bumper to inspect the damage. The Honda driver

started yelling at him, You stupid, fucking twat, what

did you think you were doing? English. Ray tried to

think of something to say that would be non-

confrontational, that would calm the guy down you

could see he was a pressure cooker waiting to blow,

wanting to blow, bouncing on his feet like an out-of-

condition heavyweight. Ray adopted a neutral stance, a

neutral expression, but then he heard the crowd give alittle collective Aah of horror and he registered the

baseball bat that had suddenly appeared in the guys

hand out of nowhere and thought, shit.

That was the last thought he had for several seconds.

When he was able to think again he was sprawled on

the street, holding the side of his head where the guyhad cracked him. He heard the sound of broken glass

the bastard was putting in every window in his car now.

He tried, unsuccessfully, to struggle to his feet but

managed only to get to a kneeling position as if he was

at prayer and now the guy was advancing with the bat

lifted, feeling the heft of it in his hand, ready to swingfor a home run on his skull. Ray put an arm up to

defend himself, made himself even more dizzy by doing

that and, sinking back on to the cobbles, thought, Jesus,

ONE GOOD TURN

20Copyright KATE ATKINSON 2011. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, storedin a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,



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is this it? Hed given up, hed actually given up some-

thing hed never done before when someone stepped

out of the crowd, wielding something square and black

that he threw at the Honda guy, clipping him on the

shoulder and sending him reeling.

He blacked out again for a few seconds and when he

came to there were a couple of policewomen hunkered

down beside him, one of them saying, Just take it easy,

sir, the other one on her radio calling for an ambulance.

It was the first time in his life that hed been glad to see

the police.

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TUESDAY

Copyright KATE ATKINSON 2011. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored

One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson Sample Chapter

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