‘Okay, thanks for that, Sly.’
‘That’s no problem either. Any time, son.’ There was another pause. ‘Say, you wouldn’t put a word in for me with Ewan Capperauld, would you? I hear he’s not too chuffed with his new agency.’
I couldn’t help but laugh. ‘What happened to scruples?’
‘Ah, but he’s with one of the big outfits; fuck them and all who sail in them.’
‘Ewan’s not for you, Sly, you know that as well as I do. I’ll introduce you to Roscoe Brown, though: he’s looking for an associate in London.’
‘Thanks, son. That’ll be appreciated. Is he Jewish?’
I was still chuckling as I hung up on him, unclipped my seatbelt and climbed out of the Citation into a blazing Mediterranean afternoon. I wondered how much hotter it was in Singapore.
15
The kids were all over me when I made it back home. Even Tom, who’s normally a quiet lad, yelled with delight when he saw me and came charging up to me, almost elbowing his half-sister out of the way. Half-sister: I looked at him and Janet and thought again of myself, and Jan. When I did so I realised, to my surprise, that the turmoil had gone. Mary was right: love really does conquer all. The thing that cracked it, that gave me peace, was the disclosure that Jan had known all along, and that she had decided that nothing, least of all an accident of birth for which neither of us had been responsible, was going to keep us apart.
I played with Janet, Tom and wee Jonathan for the rest of the afternoon, around the house and in the pool, until finally we were all knackered. When Ethel arrived to take them for their evening meal, I collapsed on to a lounger next to Susie and Prim; she had been there when I’d got back. I looked at the two of them, and thought of Jan again, and what she’d said about them. I confess that when I considered the generosity with which the good side had allowed the repentant bad side back into our circle, I began to worry. I hoped it wouldn’t backfire.
‘Is Mac really going to be all right?’ Susie asked me. I glanced to my right and saw two faces each one waiting for my answer with the same concern. My dad inspires that in people.
‘He really is,’ I promised them both. ‘He might well have died, there in the golf club, but he didn’t, and when they kept him alive long enough to get him into theatre . . . well, it hasn’t exactly been plain sailing from then on, but it’s been okay. Once he recovers fully from the surgery and the new valve gets bedded in, he’ll be as fit as any other sixty-six-year-old retired dentist, and a bloody sight fitter than most.’
‘He’s retiring?’ Prim exclaimed. I’d told Susie about Carol Salt, clearly she hadn’t passed it on.
I nodded. ‘Finally, he is. He’s decided, having nearly done it once, that dying on the golf course is a hell of a lot better than dying in harness. I’ve found someone to take on his practice and the deal’s done.’
Prim grinned. ‘What a pity. I need a filling replaced and I was hoping that Mac would do it.’
‘The world is still full of expensive dentists,’ I told her, ‘and you can afford it.’
She left at seven. She said that she’d finally agreed to have dinner with Dylan in the Columbus. While I was away, they’d shared a few Bellinis in the cocktail bar of an evening, but that had been all.
‘How is Benny?’ I asked, as I walked her to the door, where Conrad was waiting with the car.
‘Bored. He says he’s memorised the model and year of every car in the motor museum, and he’s, here I quote, “on first-name terms with every fucking fish in the fucking aquarium”. However, he also said that he’s ahead in the casino.’
‘I’m going to cure his boredom, and give him more funds to gamble with. Tell him to be waiting for me in the lobby at noon tomorrow; we’ll go for a spot of lunch and I’ll brighten his day.’ That reminded me. ‘Have you had a chance to speak to Dawn yet?’
‘No: I’m not going to break that news over the phone. I’ll see her on Thursday: she and Miles are bringing Bruce to visit Dad in Auchterarder. Oh, yes, Miles did ask how you’d got on with Mr Luker. I stalled him; told him that Mac’s illness had put things on hold, but that you’d pick it up again when you got back.’
‘Good girl. I still think he’ll go ape-shit, but you never know.’ I kissed her cheek, bade her farewell, then went back to Susie, who was in our bedroom showering off the pool water.
I hadn’t seen her for almost a week, so it was a while before we were ready for dinner. When we were, we decided that we’d go out to Le Café de la Mer, in the Grand Hotel for a bite of steak and a sea view.
Once we’d reached the coffee stage, I told her about my lunch with Harvey. When she’d picked herself off the floor and stopped laughing about the thought of him and his hard-on in a judge’s robes and wig, she became suitably outraged at the thought of Madeleine being out there and in a position to ruin his career.
‘You’ve got to help him, Oz,’ she said. ‘Harvey’s really nice; he and Ellie don’t deserve that. Find the woman and get the negatives back.’
‘I’ve had another thought.’ I chuckled casually. ‘I’ll find her and lock her in a small room with my sister.’
‘Steady on, now,’ Susie protested. ‘There’s a UN convention against that sort of thing.’ She winked at me. ‘It’s a good idea, though. Still, finding her’s the first priority. Any ideas?’
‘I know where she is.’ I explained the detective work that Sly Burr had done on my behalf.
‘Well done, Mr Burr,’ she said. ‘Singapore? That’s a long way off; maybe she won’t hear about Harvey going on the Bench.’
‘She’ll hear about it, love. Unless she’s cut herself off from every friend and relative she ever had in Britain, she’s going to find out . . . or at least we have to assume that she will. The crossed-fingers option isn’t open to us.’
‘What is, then? What can we do?’
I gazed across the table at her. ‘Well, I do have an idea, but it involves a trip out there, to Singapore. Do you fancy coming? You and the kids, that is.’
‘Have you ever been there?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘In that case you don’t have any idea how humid it can be. I know: I was there when I was eighteen and I still haven’t forgotten. I can’t take the children out there, especially not wee Jonathan: we’d have to paint him in sun-block. Plus I don’t fancy explaining to Janet and Tom that they can’t go in the pool when it’s sunny, in case they come out parboiled. Plus they have earthquakes out there and tsunamis and stuff.’
She had a valid point, a whole list of them in fact. Neither Susie nor I is the timid type, until it comes to our children. Then our protection instinct clicks in, quick time.
‘Could we send a detective?’ she asked me.
‘To do what, exactly? Harvey insisted that any steps I take have to be within the law. That being the case, we can hardly brief him not to take “fuck off” for an answer, can we?’
‘Then you’ve got to go, Oz.’
I nodded. ‘You’re right, but I’m not going alone. If I turn up on Maddy’s doorstep and ask her for those photos, one, she’s going to know who I am and how I relate to Harvey, two, no way will she hand them over in a month of February twenty-ninths. She’ll twig and she’ll send an image straight to the tabloid of her choice. But worry not, I’ve thought it through and I have a plan, a most ingenious plan.’
‘What’s that?’
‘She’s not going to send them an image. She’s going to hand it over.’
16
Dylan had done some more clothes shopping since I’d seen him last. He turned up for our meeting in a pale blue Columbus polo shirt and a pair of light tan slacks, with a pair of French-made Vuarnet sunglasses, the brand I’d advised him to buy, perched back on his head. He’d trimmed the beard until it looked more like designer stubble; for the first time since that day he’d been shot in Amsterdam, he seemed pretty much like the guy I’d known so well in Scotland.
‘Nice get-up,’ I remarked, as we
stepped outside to a waiting taxi.
‘Glad you like it,’ he replied. ‘Most of it went on your tab in the hotel. Not the shades, though: couldn’t get them here.’ Christ, he was even sounding like the old Dylan.
‘How did you last so long in the police force?’ I asked him. ‘How come nobody saw through you long before they did?’
‘I was never bent, Oz, not until I got involved with that bloke, and in the kidnap. And they never saw through me then either. It took you, you clever shit, to figure out that I was in on the operation. I was on my way to Bali, and to a pile of money, until you stepped in.’
I looked at him as the taxi drove off, heading for L’Intempo, in Le Meridien. ‘Mike, you’d never have seen any of that money. You’d have wound up buried under a banyan tree or some such.’
He glanced at me slightly scornfully. ‘You think?’
‘I know. There was someone else involved in your plot: they were pulling your string all along. You were expendable, mate, and once you were well away, you’d have been expended. Your function was simply to disappear, and to carry the can, all of it and everything in it.’
‘How do you know all that?’
‘I traced the third person; she told me all about it.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Look me in the eye,’ I challenged, ‘then say that.’ He didn’t need to: he knew me well enough to know that I was telling it as it was, or had been. ‘Who was she?’ he asked quietly.
‘Your pal’s sister.’
‘He never had a sister.’
‘That shows how much you knew. Smart copper, eh?’
I’d knocked some of the rediscovered brashness out of him; that pleased me, quietly.
‘What happened to her?’
‘Much the same as was going to happen to you. She’s no longer with us.’
‘Jesus.’
I smiled. ‘And here you were thinking you’d been a criminal mastermind. Pinocchio, pal, that’s who you were, but now you can go back to being a real boy again. Be careful telling lies, though: your nose couldn’t do with being any longer than it is. I tell you, the Dutchman who shot you, de Witt, he really did save your life.’
‘Maybe I should go to Holland and thank him,’ Dylan murmured, unsmiling, as he rubbed the side of his chest.
‘Best not, Benny,’ I said. ‘Best not.’
We sat in silence until the taxi arrived at the hotel. I paid off the driver and led the way inside: L’Intempo was quiet, since it was still not long after midday, but as I glanced around I saw a tennis player, a French singer and two racing drivers, one of whom I know since he’s a fellow Scot. I gave him a wave as we were shown to a table with a sea view.
‘Let’s get the business over with,’ I said. I opened my document case and took out the contract that Roscoe had supplied and that Audrey had produced. It was drawn up in the name of Elmer Productions, a company I’d set up with a view to getting involved in deals like this one. This was its first venture. The name? That’s a play on Mrs Susie Blackstone’s maiden surname, Gantry, and the 1960 movie that won Burt Lancaster an Oscar.
‘Read that,’ I told him. ‘It sets out the deal we discussed, on the basis of the offer I made, more or less.’
‘More or less?’
‘Just more, actually. I’ve put you in for three per cent of budget and DVD sales, and for two per cent of net profits once the film’s recovered its costs, and is in profit by twenty million dollars.’
‘Who gets the rest?’
‘I do, and Miles, and any investors we bring in. Don’t quibble about it: it’s what Roscoe Brown would have got you if he’d been negotiating for you. I know this because I asked him.’
‘What if I’d had someone better than him?’
‘That person doesn’t exist . . . although, come to think of it, neither does Benedict Luker, so maybe that idea isn’t so far-fetched. No, read it, then sign it, Mike. It’s a good deal. That and the added value in book sales will make you a millionaire.’
He signed it without reading it. I took that as a sign of friendship, and wished that I hadn’t upped the advance to the full hundred thousand, taking a chance that eventually I’d get Miles’s half back. His eyes widened when he looked at the cheque I pushed across the table, and then he did look at the contract. ‘It’s only an advance,’ I reminded him. ‘Mind you, when you tell your publisher that I’ve optioned it, your sales will go up straight away, and you’ll get a UK distribution deal.’
‘You’re beginning to sound like my guardian angel. Blue Star Falling hasn’t even earned out its advance in the US yet.’
‘I know: I checked with the publisher. I know what your advance was, but it’ll be bigger on your next one.’
‘That’s good to hear. You’ve helped me in another way this morning, although you don’t even know it. My next book: it’s a version of another true story; my own, the kidnap, me getting shot and everything. What you said about there being a third person involved, it’s got me thinking. I knew there was something lacking and that . . . It’s the missing ingredient, isn’t it? It makes it all hang together. Thanks, Oz.’
I stared at him, and had to make an effort to keep my voice down. ‘Mike, Benny, cool it,’ I hissed at him. ‘Are you seriously saying that you’re going to write a book about you kidnapping Dawn Phillips?’
‘Sure. You’ll be in it too, and Miles. But don’t worry, you’ll all be so heavily disguised that you’ll be undetectable as real people.’
‘But we’ll know, Mike, we’ll know.’
He stared at me dead-pan, and then his face cracked into a smile. ‘Gotcha!’ he exclaimed.
‘You bastard. You’re buying the lunch for that.’
‘It was worth it, just to see your face. Don’t worry, Oz, I’m not that crazy. My next book’s almost finished, in fact. It’s based on some of the stuff I did when I was under cover, and it’s going to be good.’
‘What will the DEA and the like say about that?’
‘They won’t give a shit, as long as it makes them look like the good guys.’
‘Let me see a manuscript when you get it finished.’
He grinned again. ‘Okay, but it’ll cost you more than a hundred thousand.’
We settled down to lunch, a salad, followed by sea bream. I’d given myself a hard workout in the gym that morning, so I’d earned it. As we finished a bottle of El Preludi, I turned to the next item on my agenda.
‘A friend of mine’s in trouble,’ I told him. ‘And I’m going to help him.’
I explained Harvey’s predicament, without naming him, but I could tell early on that Dylan had guessed who he was. It wouldn’t have been like him not to have got himself up to date with my life before our meeting.
‘Sounds like your friend’s in for an embarrassing time,’ he said, when I had finished. ‘The woman’s already dropped a broad hint that she has this time-bomb waiting for him and that she’s waiting to pick her moment. As soon as she gets a whiff that you’re on her trail, she’s going to let it off.’
‘Exactly. So she must never suspect that I’m after her.’
‘Then how are you going to get these negatives off her?’
‘I’m going to buy them . . . or, at least, someone is, on my behalf. Maddy, the woman, is going to have a visit from a tabloid journalist, looking to dig the dirt on her ex, who’s about to get a very big appointment. He’s going to offer her money for everything she’s got on him, and if she has photos to back it, so much the better. She’ll produce the goods.’
‘What if she only produces prints?’
‘Then it’s no deal. The tabloid’s paying for an exclusive. It can’t take the chance she’ll flog them somewhere else. The money will be for everything she’s got.’
‘How much?’
‘A hundred thou, sterling.’
‘That should get her attention.’
‘I reckon.’
‘So who’re you going to get to play the part of the j
ourno? If it’s an actor, it can’t be anyone she’s likely to have seen on telly, or in the movies. And if she’s a serial actor shagger, like you say, that makes it even more difficult.’
‘As always, Mike, you get straight to the heart of the problem.’ I leaned across the table. ‘Tell me, since you didn’t make it to Bali, how do you fancy a trip to Singapore?’
17
I hadn’t been certain that he’d agree. He’d done more role-playing in the five years gone by than all but a few people do in a lifetime, and some of it had been downright dangerous, especially the stuff he’d done after his near-death experience in Amsterdam. If he’d said, ‘No, thank you very much, I have a nice uneventful life in New York now, and I’d like it to stay that way,’ I wouldn’t have blamed him. I’d have been disappointed, though, because it would have forced me to revert to Plan B, Primavera as the journalist, and I’m sure Susie would have balked at that, however cosily they seemed to be getting along.
But he didn’t let me down. He grinned, and it was like being back in the Horseshoe bar. ‘I’ll call it a research trip,’ he said. ‘You never know, there might be a book comes out of all this.’
I shrugged my shoulders. ‘As long as the names and circumstances are changed to protect the guilty, I don’t care.’
‘Only one condition,’ he added. ‘We don’t go anywhere near Thailand. I was there under cover, and it would be dangerous for me to go back.’
I accepted that: if events took us in that direction, I’d hire local talent and leave him behind in Singapore.
The trip was taking shape, but I wanted to go out there with as much information as I could, no loose ends untied. Madeleine had moved on from Harvey to Rory Roseberry, having done a quick low-flying mission over Ewan Capperauld. Rosebud had been chopped in favour of Sandy Wilde, from whom she had moved to Barton Mawhinney, dumped in turn when he shopped her to Sly. Her last known sighting since then had been with Tony Lee.
Her sexual itinerary was pretty much mapped out, but I wondered whether there had been any other detours along the way. There was no more I could get from Ewan, Rory or Bart, but Sandy Wilde was a source of information as yet untapped.
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