Deadly Business

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘Yes. She died on board the flight to Nice, about an hour ago. It was very sudden, Tom. Audrey said she died in her sleep.’

  I’d thought he might shed a tear. After all, for that part of his early childhood when I was away, in various places, and Oz had custody, he’d been brought up by Susie, hence the name by which he always called her. But he didn’t, he sat there stoically and it was I who felt my eyes go moist. Twice in two days, Ice Maiden, I thought. What’s happening?

  ‘She was very ill, wasn’t she? Janet told me,’ he added, ‘after she’d spoken to her.’

  ‘Yes, she was. She was very frail, and in her condition, many things could have gone wrong any time. From what Audrey told me, I’d guess she had a brain haemorrhage, and died pretty much instantly.’

  ‘Was Duncan there?’

  ‘Yes, apparently so.’

  ‘What’s going to happen now? Does that mean that Duncan’s going to be Janet and wee Jonathan’s stepfather?’

  ‘I suppose it does.’

  He glared at me. ‘Mum, we can’t let that happen. He’s not a good man. They have to live with us.’

  ‘Tom,’ I sighed, ‘that’s easier said than achieved. It’s never that simple. Like it or not, Duncan and Susie were married when she died. You’re their half-brother, but I have no relationship to them at all. I suppose I could petition the court.’

  ‘You could, Mum,’ he insisted. ‘Duncan won’t want two kids. Why shouldn’t he let them live with us?’

  ‘These are not two ordinary kids,’ I pointed out, ‘any more than you are, given that your father was a famous man, and still is. Christ, there have been as many sightings of Oz Blackstone as there were of Elvis after he died! Tom, you are all wealthy kids and Susie’s will is going to make you even wealthier. If I can speak to you as if you were all grown up, not just two-thirds of the way there, I think Duncan Culshaw is a greedy, grasping son-of-a-bitch, and he’s unlikely to give up control of Janet and Jonathan’s wealth. Understand?’

  He nodded. ‘Maybe Uncle Harvey could fix it. He’s a lawyer.’

  ‘Yes, but he’s not that sort of lawyer any longer. He’s a judge. We couldn’t take a case to him, because he knows us.’

  ‘Okay, maybe he could get one of his pals to fix it!’

  I smiled at his remaining innocence … or was I the innocent, and was he right? Do the courts really work on the old pals principle? It didn’t fucking help me when I was in the dock, that’s for sure.

  ‘We have to wait and see what happens, but I promise, I won’t let anything bad happen to those kids. And nor,’ I reminded him, ‘will Conrad Kent. Speaking of whom,’ I concluded, ‘I must call Audrey again, like I promised I would.’ I picked up my coffee and took a sip, but it was cold, and anyway, I didn’t fancy it any longer.

  ‘Be a love,’ I asked him. ‘Go and get me a drink. White wine; biggest glass they’ve got.’

  He looked at his watch, raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Hey,’ I exclaimed, ‘gimme a break.’

  As he walked over to the self-service bar, I called Audrey back. ‘How are things?’ I asked. A damn silly question, looking back on it; unless Susie had suddenly stopped being dead, ‘things’ were not going to be any better.

  ‘I’m still in the VIP lounge. They’ve taken Susie’s body away to a hospital in Nice. A police officer came with the ambulance crew. I tried to persuade him to let me take her to Monaco, but no way. I’ve just spoken to the British Embassy in Paris, and told them what’s happened. They’re going to get involved, and send a consular observer to the autopsy. It’s a judicial procedure; the authorities have to satisfy themselves that the death was natural. Once they’ve done that, they’ll release the body.’

  ‘Who’ll organise the funeral?’

  ‘Me, if I’m still around. I’ve just had a blazing row with Duncan. He knows about our being appointed to the board. It went public as scheduled; the text that he had must have tipped him off. As soon as he finished that phone call I told you about earlier he came storming in here and started yelling at me, even though I was in the middle of talking to the police officer. What the hell did I think I was playing at, I’d manipulated a dying woman, and it was all that witch Primavera’s doing; nasty, furious, threatening stuff. Eventually the policeman intervened, and told him to have some respect. Duncan didn’t understand him, of course, so he just carried on. He might have been arrested if the airport manager hadn’t intervened and explained who he was, and that he’d just lost his wife. He quietened down after that, and walked out again. I don’t know where he is now. And I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘That’s obvious, Audrey. You get yourself back to Monaco as fast as you can; it’s essential that you’re there when Conrad gets back with the kids. Have you called him?’

  ‘Not yet. It’s not easy; the children will be in the car with him.’

  Tom appeared at my side with a large glass of yellow-hued wine. ‘Don’t say anything about what’s happened,’ I suggested. ‘Just ask him what time he expects to arrive, and tell him that things have changed with Susie, and that you’re not going to Scotland any more.’

  ‘But I have to, Primavera; the board meeting.’

  ‘There will be a quorum without you, trust me. You’re needed in Monaco; things have happened over the last couple of days to make that essential, now that Susie’s gone. Listen,’ I said, ‘Susie’s intention in appointing us to the board was to protect the children’s interests. That was when she was alive, and it’s all the more important now that she isn’t; you have to be with them. I will handle the board meeting on my own, don’t worry.’

  ‘What about the other things she asked you to do for her? Setting up the trust, her will?’

  ‘I don’t know. She gave me a very clear written mandate, and her signed authority to implement it. It’s clear that while she accepted Duncan as her husband, she didn’t want him controlling her kids’ inheritance in the event of her death.’

  ‘Maybe we’ve got him wrong,’ Audrey said. ‘Perhaps he’ll agree to what Susie wanted.’

  ‘Can you see the sky where you are?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, puzzled.

  ‘Are there any pigs up there? Audrey, don’t be naive; all the peaches have fallen off the tree at once and landed in bloody Duncan’s lap. Damn it!’ I snapped. ‘Why the hell did she have to fly so soon? Didn’t she know how fragile she was?’

  ‘Yes, she did. Her doctor spelled it out for her the last time she saw him. He was okay with the Vegas trip, but told her she should stay in Arizona for another two weeks at least, preferably a month, with her platelet levels being monitored, before even thinking about flying transcontinental. He said her blood chemistry was still too unstable.’

  ‘Was Duncan aware of that?’

  ‘Yes, we both sat in on the meeting.’

  ‘And he let her fly?’

  ‘Yes, but so did I, Primavera, so did I. I didn’t want her to, but she insisted; she told me that she knew she was going to die soon anyway, and wanted to see her kids before she did. I suggested that we could fly Janet and wee Jonathan out to Arizona, but she said the trip would be too tough for them, since they would know why they were going, or at least Janet would, for sure. Duncan backed her up; he said that if I didn’t book the flights, he would.’

  ‘God,’ I snapped. ‘You’re making it sound as if he wanted her to die.’ I’d forgotten completely that Tom was sitting alongside me. At the edge of my vision I saw him stiffen in his chair, glanced at him and saw his eyes ablaze with a fury that his wing chun master definitely would not have liked.

  ‘I’m only telling you how it was,’ she replied. ‘Do you know what her last words were? After she said she was going to sleep on the flight to be alert when she met the kids, she said, “I’m not looking forward to telling them what I’ve done.” Now I’ll have to tell them, unless Duncan gets to them first.’

  ‘You won’t,’ I said. ‘They know already. And they’re not ha
ppy.’

  ‘In that case, I’ve got to go, now. I’ve just seen, literally a couple of seconds ago, Duncan getting into a taxi, and you can bet he’s heading for Susie’s. The swine’s even left me to take care of the baggage.’

  ‘Then get off your mark and call me later, in Glasgow.’

  I ended the call. ‘What did you mean?’ Tom asked, immediately. ‘About him wanting Susie Mum to die?’

  ‘Nothing. Forget I said it. I was angry, like you’re always telling me not to be.’

  ‘If Dad was alive, he’d be angry,’ he countered.

  ‘If your dad was alive, Duncan wouldn’t be there, would he?’

  I sighed, feeling suddenly tired myself. I thought of Susie on her last flight and had a moment of panic. What if I wasn’t here either? None of us know the moment when it will end.

  I needed comfort. I called Liam.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, cheerily. ‘Are you not on board yet?’

  I told him what had happened, and put an end to his happy morning. ‘Oh shit,’ he murmured. ‘That’s terrible. I am so sorry. Those poor kids.’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘What are you going to do? Go to Monaco or come back here?’

  ‘Neither. Audrey’s staying at home, but I still have to go to Glasgow; there will be a board meeting in the morning and I will be in the chair, as Susie wanted it.’

  ‘How’s that going to go down?’

  ‘With the bereaved widower? Spectacularly badly. With the rest of the board? I have no idea. But I have to do it.’

  ‘Wish I could help,’ he murmured.

  ‘You just did. Be there when I get back, okay?’

  He chuckled. ‘I will, I will, honest.’

  I ended the call and went to check the flight status. It showed ‘Boarding’. We didn’t rush to get there, as we were fast-track category, and by the time we did, most of the passengers were in place. I let Tom have the window place. He shoved his man-bag under the seat in front, once he’d retrieved his iPad (a Christmas present from Grandpa Mac; Janet had the same) and the Bose in-ear phones he’d had from me, and held them in his lap, obedient to the regulations, until we were in the air and the seat-belt sign was off, when he disappeared into a combination of Beyoncé and a Spanish e-novel called The Sun over Breda, one of the adventures of Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s swashbuckling swordsman, Captain Alatriste.

  He didn’t say much during the flight, even declining the meal, and I left him to his thoughts. He’d been introduced to death far too young to understand it fully … ‘Who does?’ you might ask … and I wondered whether the latest encounter would make him revisit the first.

  Once we touched down in Heathrow, however, he was his usual self. Just as well, for I didn’t need any hassle. I’m one of those people who will take any alternative to flying through Heathrow, particularly when I have to change terminals, and my pawing in Barcelona had made me even less enthusiastic as I approached the transfer process. But we got lucky. The bus left as soon as we stepped on and our business class status speeded us through security. The lounge was packed, in complete contrast to the other one, so busy that we went for a Starbuck’s instead, and a sandwich, since Tom had decided that finally he was hungry. Looking back, the journey and its complexities formed a bubble around us both, one that isolated us from the awful thing that had happened earlier. It would come back to haunt us later, I knew, but at that moment, the presence of so much bustling life around us kept the dead at bay.

  The London-Edinburgh leg was more crowded, and with only a single class of travel in that flight, less comfortable. We were in the third row, seats A and B. C was already occupied when we arrived, by a guy who looked as if he’d been a rugby prop forward in his youth, and had put on a lot of weight since. Tom gave him one glance and pushed me towards the window seat.

  We arrived on time, and amazingly, so did our luggage. We wheeled it to the Hertz desk … quite a long wheel in Edinburgh these days, and soon we were on our way. It had been a while since I was last in Glasgow, so I was grateful for the satnav that Audrey had specified when she’d booked the car. It’s not that I don’t know how to find the city, but road systems change all the time, and in some it’s possible to see your destination without being able to get anywhere near it, if you don’t know exactly how. I needn’t have worried, though; West George Street still ran in the same direction as it had the last time I was there. We came off the M8 and more or less drove straight to the door.

  I let the door crew take care of the luggage and of parking the car, and led Tom through the imposing entrance into the foyer of a building that had once been an episcopal church.

  There have been times in my life, very few of them, when I’ve refused to believe the evidence of my own eyes. That was one of them. There was a guy standing beside reception, and for a moment I thought it was Liam, but I dismissed the silly notion and marched on without giving him a second glance, until Tom exclaimed, ‘Hey, how did you get here? You were in St Martí when we were at Barcelona Airport.’

  ‘That is true, buddy,’ he conceded, ‘but what’s the point of being a GWA superhero if you don’t exercise your superpowers from time to time?’

  I stared at him, still in denial. ‘But …’ was all I could say, and then he smiled and I more or less melted into him. ‘But,’ I sighed, ‘I am so fucking glad you’re here. I don’t know why, for I am a forceful and independent woman … “My Way” could have been written for me … but I am. Now, how the hell did you manage it?’

  ‘You can thank my ex,’ he said, as I released him from my grasp. ‘After you called, I was sitting there worrying about you two. I reckoned a little back-up wouldn’t do any harm even if I couldn’t get to you till tomorrow. So I went online and saw there was a flight from Girona to Prestwick, today, with a couple of hours to departure. It was showing “Full” but I took a wild chance and phoned Erin. Miracle of miracles, her husband was the pilot; she called him and he got me a jump seat. I made it to the airport just in time. Honest, I’ll never say another bad word about the guy, or about his airline.’

  ‘When did you get here?’

  ‘About two minutes ago. I was just in the process of booking myself a room when you walked through the door.’

  ‘You don’t need to do that,’ Tom volunteered. ‘We’ve got a room spare, now that Audrey isn’t coming.’

  That was true, but it wasn’t how I wanted things to work out. I looked at Liam. ‘Wait there and do nothing,’ I ordered.

  I took my son across to the window to the right of the door. ‘It’s big boy time,’ I said. ‘How would you feel if Liam and I shared a room?’

  ‘Would it be forever?’ he asked.

  ‘I have no idea. But he’s a good man, I like him and I want to be with him just now. Could you handle that?’

  He looked up at me, but only up by a couple of inches. ‘In my English class,’ he began, ‘we’ve been doing a poem called “The Lady of Shallot”. Do you know it?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. I love it. It’s how our language is supposed to be. Do you like it?’

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘Because when I read the words, they make me think of you, and that’s sad. Dad’s dead, Mum, he’s not coming back, and it’s time you had a loyal knight and true, not just a pageboy like me. I don’t want you to wind up like the Lady did.’

  Profound? All parents think we know our kids, and what their capabilities are, but mostly we’re wrong. Our expectations are usually over the top, or we take the gloomy view, that they’ll get by and that’ll be enough. I’ve always tried to expect nothing of Tom, other than decency, honesty and integrity, and he’s shown me every one of those. But when he said that to me, I was plain flat out astonished.

  ‘How long have you thought that way?’ I asked.

  ‘For a while now. I want you to be happy. I wouldn’t want you to be with a culo like Duncan Culshaw, but you’re too sensible ever to pick anyone like him. I like Liam, so if you want to live en
pareja with him, I won’t mind.’

  ‘I’ll still be your best pal, you know,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll still be my mum and that’s the important thing.’

  I gave him a quick kiss on the forehead and then returned to reception, where I did a deal. Two minutes later, Liam and I had what they called a Rock ’n’ Roll suite, for a reason that still escapes me, and Tom had a room along the corridor. It had just gone six thirty; I booked a table in the brasserie for half past eight and told Tom that we’d knock on his door on the way down.

  You probably imagine that we put those two hours to good use. You’d be quite right, but you may continue to imagine the details, for I’m not planning to describe them. There was a moment when it did seem a little weird to be in bed with a man on the day that a long-standing friend had died, but it didn’t take me longer than another moment to realise that if our roles in the day’s drama had been reversed, Susie would have done exactly the same thing.

  The only things I will say are that it was good, and that having a man’s seed sown deep inside me … don’t worry, I was nowhere near ovulation, although I made a mental note to go back on the pill for as long as I needed it … put my Barcelona bunny friend in its proper perspective. I made a mental note to attend the next Estartit car boot sale and slip it into someone’s car, in a box labelled ‘Ten euro’ when they weren’t looking. I had the very lady in mind for the nice surprise.

  We didn’t talk much, Liam and I, not for a while at any rate, not until we were soaping each other in the suite’s enormous shower … you could have fitted the whole Rock ’n’ Roll band in there. ‘Tom okay?’ he asked me, finally.

  ‘Tom is fine. He sees you as Lancelot … and I want no lewd cracks about that name,’ I added, as I explained what he’d said about Tennyson’s poem.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Liam exclaimed. ‘I assume he takes his sensitivity from his mother’s side of the family, for it was never evident in his old man, not that I could see.’ As he spoke, he felt his nose, checking that it was intact.

  I smiled. ‘As a matter of fact, he does. My mother was an author, and my dad, whom I plan for you to meet later this week, is a craftsman, in wood. That’s if you’re willing, of course. I’ll understand if you don’t want to get involved with families yet.’