For The Death Of Me

by Jardine, Quintin

  ‘I have a post-office box,’ she replied. ‘It’s best here.’ She wrote the number on the back of a restaurant card and gave it to me. ‘Thanks, Oz. It’s been wonderful to meet you. I will think about everything, I promise.’

  I parted from her there; she said she wanted to catch the MRT, so I walked her to the Clarke Quay station. We kissed goodbye . . . it was meant to be just a friendly peck, but it wound up going on for a little longer than one of those. The last I saw of her, she was waving, as the escalator took her down and out of my sight.

  33

  I was still thinking about Marie when Dylan and I met in the foyer at five thirty, as arranged. I went through the check-out procedures and paid the bill. Then we dumped our cases with the valet, who would look after them till ‘Go to Changi Airport’ time. I’d arranged for Hertz to collect the car.

  We were waiting to cross Bras Basah Road, heading for Raffles, when my mobile sounded. It was Ricky Ross.

  ‘Can you speak?’ he asked, as the green man showed.

  ‘Yes, but it’ll be cooler once I get into the shade.’

  ‘What time is it with you?’

  ‘Tea time.’ I stepped into the shadow of Raffles and leaned against the wall. ‘Do you have something?’

  ‘Too right. This guy you met, his real name’s Sammy Goss and he is well and truly on the run. He did indeed leave Scotland eight years ago, but not from Maryhill. He escaped from custody on his way to a committal hearing; he was due to stand trial on two counts of murder in Glasgow, and after that he was going to London for a third. All three of them were gang-related.’

  ‘Any Chinese connections?’

  ‘Why do you ask that? As it happens, two of the victims were Chinese. The London case was a guy who’d upset some people in Chinatown. When Goss was picked up in Glasgow, the gun he’d used in one of the killings there was matched to that one.’

  ‘What did he use in the third?’

  ‘A knife. He was linked to several other hits, but those were the only ones they could proceed on. Are you telling me he’s in Singapore?’

  ‘Not any more.’

  ‘Oz, I’ve pulled some strings for this information. The people I’ve talked to want to know why I’m asking.’

  ‘Tell them to cross him off their list. He’s dead.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I have the word of a reliable witness,’ I told him. ‘It seems Sammy underestimated somebody and took one in the back of the head.’

  ‘Will the Singapore police confirm this?’

  ‘It happened in Malaysia, not Singapore, but nobody’s going to confirm it, because there isn’t going to be a body.’

  ‘Fucking hell, Oz,’ Ricky gasped, ‘what have you got yourself into?’

  ‘Nothing at all. I’m catching a plane in a few hours and I’m heading back home, clean as a whistle. Did Goss have any family? He told me he had a mother, a sister and two nephews and that he went home every couple of years or so.’

  ‘He was kidding: his father died in a pub fight twenty years ago and his mother boozed herself to death. No sister, only a granny; the police check her out every so often, but he’s never shown up there. Do you know who killed him?’

  ‘You didn’t ask me that; just tell your former colleagues on the quiet that they can stop staking out his granny’s. If they ever see anything of him again, it’ll be in a can of fucking tuna.’

  ‘You wouldn’t like to tell me what brand, would you?’

  ‘That’s a hard one. If you like the stuff, I’d build up a big stock now, if I were you, before Sammy’s had time to get into the human food chain.’

  ‘Jesus, Oz. You definitely hung around with Dylan for too long, d’you know that?’

  34

  With the time difference, I made it home to Monaco for a late breakfast on Wednesday. Dylan and I had parted in Frankfurt, since I had done a complicated ticket transfer to see him back home to New York, through Paris.

  If I said that the kids were pleased to see me again, I would be guilty of the sort of understatement that I abhor. They were ecstatic, at least the two older ones were, and wouldn’t let go of me not even after I’d given them the toys I’d bought for them in the Raffles shop and in a place in the Citylink Mall that had just about everything for kids.

  Even with the melatonin I was running on empty, but we spent a couple of hours on the pool, and then I took them to the Cousteau Institute aquarium . . . again . . . and to the motor museum, of course. I had to tell them about Singapore too; as much as I could, at any rate. By the time I’d finished I’d promised to take them there as soon as their mum said they were old enough to go, although to be honest, after what I’d seen, I was glad that would be a right few years away.

  Susie was pleased to see me too, you understand, although she kept her ecstasy under control better than they did. The fact that I was twenty-four hours late might have helped her in that. In fact, she kept it to herself until they had gone off with Ethel to start the getting-ready-for-bed process.

  Afterwards, as we lay side by side looking out at the blue sea and at the red ball of the sun as it began to dip towards the horizon, she nudged my shoulder with her head. ‘That was pretty good, considering the trip you’ve had, and the time it took you to get back, and the fact that you haven’t been in touch since Sunday. Are you going to tell me now? Did you get Harvey’s pictures? Did you pay the woman off?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What did you get?’

  ‘I got my Siegfried and Roy T-shirt ruined and I nearly got arrested twice.’

  She propped herself on an elbow, eyes wide, ‘What for?’

  ‘Murder.’

  ‘Murder!’

  ‘Don’t shout, for Christ’s sake, the kids will hear you. I didn’t do it, either of them, honest.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘A wee Scots guy called Sammy did the first one: he knifed Maddy’s boyfriend just before I was due to meet him in that bar on Sunday night. Then Maddy killed him. That was self-defence, though: he was going to cut her head off and take it to the Triad chieftain because she’d upset him.’

  She put a hand on my forehead. ‘Oz, are you feeling all right? You haven’t got malaria, have you?’

  ‘It doesn’t take effect that quickly.’

  ‘Has Mike Dylan been trying out his next book on you?’

  ‘No, he hasn’t, and you must be very careful never to call him that again, not where anyone can hear you. There are people out there who would kill him with a blowlamp if they thought he was alive.’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me you’re serious?’

  I pointed across the bedroom. ‘See that knapsack on your dressing-table stool?’ She nodded. ‘Go and get it, there’s a girl.’

  ‘Why don’t you get it yourself?’

  ‘Because I like watching you in the buff.’

  ‘Oh. That’s fair enough, then.’ She got up from the bed, skipped across the room, fetched the bag, then sat back down beside me.

  ‘Open it.’

  She did, and looked inside. ‘Oz! What’s this?’

  ‘Fifty thousand of Uncle Sam’s dollars,’ I told her, ‘drawn from Amex to give to Maddy, only she sent Tony Lee, her renegade Triad boyfriend instead. They must have been watching him, for his account got closed off before we got there.’

  ‘We? You mean Mike went with you to that bar, and him in danger there?’

  ‘He insisted, but it wasn’t a risk for him. Only one guy in Singapore knows about his Interpol work, and he’s on our side. Thank Christ, I might add, because he cleaned up the mess.’

  She sat for a while, frowning as she took it all in. ‘So Harvey’s ex is on the run from these diehards . . .’

  ‘Triads.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She took a photograph of their top man, and they found out. His identity’s the biggest secret in South East Asia, apparently.’

  ‘Why did she do that?’

  ‘She thought Tony
was shagging him. As it turned out, he worked for him.’

  ‘So she’s out there, with these desperadoes after her, and you’re back here? You’re her only hope and you’ve abandoned her.’

  ‘That’s how it looks, but we’d nowhere else to go.’

  ‘Bollocks! There’s always somewhere else to go; you’re always telling me that. Get out there and find her.’

  I smiled at her. There is no greater motivator than my lovely wife. ‘I was hoping you’d say that,’ I told her.

  35

  Where do you begin looking for a woman you don’t really know who’s missing on the other side of the world? At home seemed to me to be a good place to start. Next morning I called Harvey: there was no answer from his mobile, so I had him paged at the Advocates’ Library.

  ‘Oz,’ he said, slightly breathlessly, when he came on line, ‘where are you?’

  I told him. ‘But I’m empty-handed,’ I added.

  ‘She wouldn’t co-operate?’

  ‘No, to be fair to her, it’s more a case of not being able to. Remember I told you that things had gone sour for her out there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, that was maybe understating it a little. She’s got herself mixed up with some very bad people and now she’s on the run.’

  ‘Where?’ Harvey’s a naturally unflappable guy, but this time he was flapping good style. He’d forgotten about photographs, and everything else. I’d guessed right about his reaction: Maddy was a bitch, but for a while she’d been his bitch.

  ‘Her last known location was an island off Malaysia. From there she headed back to the mainland, but that’s it.’

  ‘What do these people want from her?’

  ‘Same as you, some photographs, but I don’t think they exist any more. Now they just want her.’

  ‘But what are they going to do with her?’ He sounded bewildered; this was a man who had spent part of his career prosecuting and occasionally defending a succession of fairly vicious criminals . . . if Sammy Goss hadn’t escaped, he might well have been on the list . . . yet he didn’t get it.

  ‘They’re going to kill her, Harvey.’

  ‘My God! Oz, what can I do? Have you reported this to the police out there?’

  ‘The police know about it, but there’s nothing they can do. If she gets out of the region she’s got a better chance, but we still need to find her. Once we’ve done that we can keep her safe . . . or try to.’

  ‘How do we do that?’

  ‘Through the other side of her life. Sooner or later she’ll contact someone she knows. Friend, relative, maybe even you. Tell me what you can about her family, her friends, those you can remember at any rate.’

  ‘Her father’s dead; his name was Luke Raymond. He was quite an eminent photo-journalist, but he was killed in the Lebanon twenty-five years ago. Madeleine takes her adventurous side from him. Janine, her mother, is the opposite, a vicar’s daughter from Uxbridge. I’m still on her Christmas-card list, but I doubt if Madeleine is. There’s one sister, Theresa, three years older. She was a career academic, a reader in philosophy at Cambridge when Madeleine and I were married. And there’s a younger brother, Trevor, who was in the army last I heard.’

  ‘Did the sister have a husband?’

  ‘No. A wife would be more likely. As for friends . . . Maddy didn’t have any close female friends that I knew of. She hung around the theatre company in Edinburgh, at the expense, eventually, of our marriage, but you know that. She may have had some there.’

  ‘She met Primavera there; Dawn was with the company at the time.’

  ‘Did she indeed? Yes, I can imagine those two would get on. Things in common.’

  I chuckled quietly. ‘Shagging actors, you mean?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have been so blunt.’

  ‘No, but you’re a lawyer: you’re trained to bring out responses like that one. Do you have an address for your former mother-in-law, better still a telephone number?’

  He had both: he read them out and I noted them on the pad I keep on my desk. ‘Will you start with her?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll look everywhere, don’t worry. I’ll even go back to Rosebud.’

  ‘When you find her, what will you do? From what you’ve said I surmise it’s organised crime that’s on her tail. How can we protect her from people like that, in the long term?’

  ‘Harvey, right now, I don’t have a clue, but that question won’t arise till we find her.’

  I hung up and looked across at Susie, who had come into my study half-way through the conversation. (I know: it sounds pretentious, a bloke from Fife having a study, but it’s my quiet room. I use it to read scripts and to do the sort of business that doesn’t allow for kids yelling in your ear.)

  ‘Needle in a haystack, isn’t it?’ she said.

  ‘I wish it was that easy; you could find that with a big enough magnet. A crumb in a biscuit factory might be a better analogy. And speaking of crumbs . . .’

  I turned to my computer and opened the AOL search engine. Two minutes later I had a number for Pitlochry Festival Theatre and three minutes after that a very helpful director had given me the number of the small hotel where Rory Roseberry was living during the run of Death of a Salesman. He was there. Good start, I thought.

  ‘Rosebud? Oz Blackstone.’

  ‘Oh, no, fuck off, please.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t want to speak to you, Blackstone. Leave me alone, or I’ll . . .’ I could hear him searching for a threat. ‘I’ll complain to Equity.’

  ‘Listen to me quake in my sandals. You’re fifty million euros too late for that.’

  ‘Oz, please, leave me alone. First it’s you thumping me, now it’s this other bloke.’

  ‘What other bloke?’

  ‘Trevor, Maddy’s brother. He was waiting for me after the show last night; crazy man. He wanted to know if I had spoken to you about her. When I said I had he beat me up. You should see my face: Makeup won’t have a chance with it. I’m out of the run.’

  ‘Have you called the police?’

  ‘What? And have him come back again some time?’

  ‘What did he say, this guy? Anything other than that?’

  ‘He was yelling at me so much I can hardly remember, but this one sticks. As he was kicking me, on the ground, he said, “Putting him on her trail nearly got her killed. He’s a fucking hitman for his brother-in-law.” Don’t tell me what he meant; I don’t want to know.’

  ‘Anything else, Rory? Did he say anything else?’

  ‘I don’t know. Wait, he said, “And he’s next.” Yes, that was it. Now please, Oz, get off the line.’

  He didn’t have to tell me that. I cut the call then redialled the Advocates’ Library. ‘Page Mr January again, please.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the operator replied. ‘Mr January is unavailable.’

  ‘I spoke to him ten minutes ago. I know he’s there.’

  ‘That may be, sir, but he’s unavailable.’

  ‘This is his brother-in-law, Oz Blackstone, and it’s urgent. Now make him available.’

  ‘Hold, please, sir.’

  I held, as patiently as I could. After a minute or so, the operator returned. ‘I’m connecting you now, sir.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Harvey . . .’

  ‘It’s not Harvey, I’m afraid,’ a smooth Edinburgh voice replied. ‘This is the Dean of Faculty. Harvey has just been attacked in the Great Hall while promenading with an instructing solicitor. It only happened five minutes ago but from what I can gather it was completely unprovoked. The man burst into the hall, saw Harvey and went for him.’

  ‘With a weapon?’

  ‘No, his bare hands, but that was bad enough. He was still unconscious when I left him to take your call.’

  ‘And the man?’

  ‘He was restrained by other advocates and eventually by the police. We have officers in attendance in the vicinity of the court all the time, as you can imagine. I don
’t know anything about him, though.’

  ‘I do. His name’s Trevor Raymond and he used to have the same job description as me: Harvey’s brother-in-law. You can tell the police that.’

  ‘Thanks, I will. CID are on their way from Gayfield Square.’

  ‘Good, because I’m on my way too.’

  The decision was made pretty much there and then: Susie and I were going into the jet-charter business. I told her what had happened, asked her to call Ellie before the Dean or the police did, then tasked Audrey with booking me another Citation flight to Edinburgh. I was in the air by eleven thirty, and in Edinburgh before one, British Summer Time.

  By that time Harvey was out of whatever danger he’d been in. He’d been rushed to the Western General, but had come round in the ambulance. The neurologists were satisfied that he’d sustained nothing more sinister than severe concussion. That would wear off in a couple of days, but the broken nose and three cracked ribs would take rather longer to heal. In my relief, I found myself wondering if a Supreme Court judge had ever been installed before while wearing a couple of black eyes.

  I’d called Ricky Ross before leaving Cannes. He was waiting for me at the general-aviation terminal and drove me straight to the police headquarters building at Fettes. Ricky still has a lot of clout with Lothian and Borders Police: he’d dropped a word and the case had been taken over by Special Branch.

  We were met by a guy called Detective Chief Inspector Oliver Coffey; he looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. He assumed that my interest was straightforward.

  ‘Have you got any idea why Raymond should do this?’ he asked me. ‘Mr January’s been divorced from his sister for ten years, and as far as I can gather they’ve had no contact since then. Is he just a nutter?’

  ‘He may well be, but it’s not as simple as that. I’d like you to do me a favour, and let me speak to him alone.’

  Coffey whistled like a kettle coming to the boil. ‘I don’t know if I can do that, Oz. This guy’s dangerous.’

  ‘So am I,’ I told him. ‘After what he did to Harvey, and to a harmless wee actor up in Pitlochry last night, I’d just love him to have a go at me. But chain him to the floor if it makes you happy. I promise I won’t touch him.’