We shot it in September . . . the city would have been just too crowded in August, when the real Edinburgh Festival was on. For me it was great; it meant that I could commute from Glasgow on a virtually daily basis for the six weeks of shooting, bonus quality time with Susie and Janet. From the start I knew how good it was going to be, and how good I was going to be too. It was my seventh movie . . . after Vancouver I had done one in the South of Italy (in which I had an almost nude scene with an actress whom ten years before I’d fancied like crazy; an odd and slightly scary experience) and another in Hollywood . . . and there was no hesitancy left in me. I knew what I was doing, I no longer felt out of place on set, and I had an acting coach to rub off my rough edges.
Even before it was released I knew I had made it in my own right as a performer, finally and irreversibly. I knew how good I’d been, especially in Andy’s huge emotional scene at the end. I was pretty sure that the old, cold, angry Oz wouldn’t have been able to do that.
I’d like to say that there wasn’t a trace of him left, but, in my new spirit of honesty, I can’t. In a few months he would make a return appearance, angrier, more ruthless and a lot more calculating. But I’ll get to that in due course.
Chapter 2
For that time, though, life continued as what passed for Susie and me as normal. I went back to work shooting Skinner’s Festival, Miles Grayson in the lead, Dawn typecast as his wife, Scott Steele as the old chief constable, randy Rhona Waitrose as Miles’s screen daughter, Alexis, and Liam Matthews, my wrestler buddy, following up his debut in the first Skinner movie, as one of the detective team.
There were a couple of additions, though: the story called for two villains, who turn out at the end to be brother and sister. My character, Andy, was to fall for the girl, while the other would get off with Alexis/Rhona, all with disastrous consequences. Miles cast a genuine brother and sister team in these parts, José and Roxanne Benali. Roxanne was pretty tempting, I have to admit. We had a couple of scenes where there was a lot of skin involved, and she didn’t hold anything back in either of them. That made it difficult, because it meant that I could not allow myself to appear any less enthusiastic than her. In the end I just imagined that she was Susie, and gave her my best simulated shot, thanking my stars that it was a closed set, with only Miles and essential crew around. (A couple of years earlier and . . . given Roxanne’s ‘commitment to her part’, as she put it, and under the duvet her interest in mine . . . it might not have been simulated.)
We shot the thing, start to finish, in a total of ten weeks. Most of the schedule was in Edinburgh, but we had a couple of trips south to a big sound stage for disaster scenes which could not have been filmed in their actual locations . . . it would have meant blowing them up.
Normally, once we were finished I would have looked forward to my usual lazy month between projects, but Susie had my dance-card well filled. Right at the top of our list of things to do was moving house.
We liked where we lived in Glasgow, our city centre apartment in an award-winning conversion, but now that I was becoming a bit famous, it was less and less practical. Our neighbours were nice people, and they never once complained about the punters hanging around the place, or the photographers who never seemed to be too far away. After a while, though, we decided that we couldn’t inflict the inconvenience on them any longer. So we looked around Scotland and found a country house set in a small estate within sight of Loch Lomond, with plenty of room for us, for Janet, for any more Janets who might come along, for Ethel Reid, our nanny, and with a small lodge house to accommodate Jay Yuille, our chauffeur.
Actually, Jay was a bit more than a chauffeur, although driving Susie to the office and me to the airport was in his job description. He was our minder, an ex-soldier recruited by my eventually trusted friend Ricky Ross, whose consultancy handles nearly all the security work for Miles Grayson’s UK movie projects. As my star began to get bigger, Miles had taken pains to impress upon me that famous people with children can’t be too careful. He and Dawn employed a children’s nurse for Brucie; she was ex-LAPD, and she took it ill when they came to the UK and she couldn’t pack her .38 S&W special. Our guy Jay had fought in Afghanistan and was formidable enough without firearms.
The house move went off with barely a hitch . . . not that we were moving much. Susie had hired an interior designer who had charged us a fee, then compounded the cost by furnishing almost all of the place from scratch. The only things we took with us were Janet’s familiar things from the nursery and our big partners’ desk, where we used to sit and work while looking down on the City of Glasgow, its traffic flowing beneath us. We found a spot for that in our new home, setting up our shared office in one of the big conservatories built on either side of the house, each having a panoramic view of the loch below. The other one enclosed a heated swimming pool, but its door was always locked; our Janet was into everything and in no time at all she would be big enough to reach the handle. Even though she’s a water-baby, she wasn’t to be trusted on her own.
The old apartment was sold, after a little soul-searching. We had considered keeping it as a pied-à-terre, but decided eventually to give the neighbours a complete break by moving it on. Barney Farmer, the Gantry Group lawyer, put it on the market at an exorbitant figure and had an unconditional offer next day. The buyer, he said, was a company, not an individual; slightly strange in Scotland, but in fact, so was the seller, and for the money that was offered Susie and I weren’t bothered. The deal was signed off and we waved it a fond goodbye.
Life was idyllic again; there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and even my career was conspiring to keep it that way. We enjoyed Christmas with the family at home: my nephews, Jonny and his brother Colin, dry-nosed for once, and showing signs of becoming sensible, took to the new place, and especially to the pool.
I had to marvel at the change in Jonathan. To me it seemed to have happened overnight, but actually it had taken place when I was away on one of my projects. When I got home I’d called Ellie to catch up. Everyone was out, so the answer machine cut in. ‘Hello,’ I heard myself say. ‘You’ve reached the Sinclair residence. I’m afraid we can’t take your call just now, but if you leave a message we’ll call you back.’ I left a message, but I was seriously puzzled. I couldn’t remember ever recording an answer message for my sister. I knew that my Dad hadn’t done it. He and I sound almost identical on the phone, but not quite.
She laughed when I asked her about it. ‘Time moves on, young brother,’ she said.
I let my mouth fall open. ‘You don’t mean . . .’
‘I do. That was our Jonny.’
I’d been curiously disturbed by that. Since Ellen and her husband split up, the boys have seen very little of their father, an irredeemable workaholic. My Dad’s always been close, but he’s their grandfather, and that’s different. In search of a father substitute, Jonathan in particular has always drifted to me. I felt that I’d missed an important part of his life, and I was sorry.
After our family Christmas we brought in the New Year in Florida, taking Janet to Disney World; Susie had decided that she had gone long enough without sunshine. Once the festivities were over, I had to endure the hardship of a three-month film shoot in the Caribbean, and on the horizon after that, Roscoe Brown’s finest achievement to date, my first top billing part.
I was to play the title role in Mathew’s Tale, a drama set in pre-Victorian Scotland, and directed by the eminent Frenchman Paul Girone, about the adventures of a Napoleonic War veteran who returns home to discover that he has been given up for dead and that his intended has married someone else. I was to co-star, my name headlining, with Louise Golding, an American hot ticket, and with the formidable Ewan Capperauld, who had been cast originally as Deputy Chief Constable Bob Skinner in my first Miles Grayson cop movie, only for personal problems to force his late withdrawal. I was glad that Ewan had decided to come out of his self-imposed exile. For all that he could be a bit of a lovey, I had found m
yself liking the guy.
Scott Steele was in it too, of course. These days you can’t cast a movie in Scotland without finding a part for old Scott. He gets pissed off when reviewers call him ‘the Finlay Currie of his generation’, but it’s easy to see what they mean. If they still made movies with Moses in the cast, he’d be the guy parting the Red Sea every time.
The added bonus about this project, apart from the incredible money that Roscoe had screwed out of the producers, was the location. Much of it was being shot in Scotland, in a scenic Fife village, in Edinburgh’s Old and New Towns, and in a countryside setting not far from our house in Loch Lomond.
It couldn’t have been better, it really couldn’t. It was just too bad that, in the immortal words of a Polish guy of my acquaintance, it all went to rat-shit.
Chapter 3
The Caribbean thing, a remake of Island in the Sun, was pretty good, and so, they all said, was I. Weekend trips back to Scotland weren’t practical, but I had written a couple of visits for Susie and Janet into my contract, so the homesickness wasn’t too bad.
It was wrapped on time. We had a Bacardi party to celebrate, then I headed back to Scotland at the beginning of an unusually pleasant spring.
Almost the first thing Susie and I did on my return was to take Janet up to Anstruther for a couple of days, to visit my Dad and Mary, my stepmother. On Saturday afternoon, with no patients to be seen, it was decided that the ladies would visit Ellen and Colin in St Andrews, to allow us guys . . . Jonny is a good enough golfer now to hold his end up with us . . . an afternoon on the links at Elie.
I’ve played some of the finest and most famous courses in the world . . . Pebble Beach, Valderrama, Wentworth, Kiawah Island, where alligators count as a hazard . . . yet I’ve never enjoyed any of them more than Elie on a nice day. The Old Course at St Andrews may be the most famous in Fife, but it’s not the most distinctive. It doesn’t have an old submarine periscope sticking through the roof of the starter’s hut.
It’s true, I swear, and since it was installed thousands of players have thanked the retired sea dog who gifted it to the club. Since the landing area for the first drive can’t be seen from the tee, and has a tight out-of-bounds on the right, the opening hole was a confusing and dangerous place in the old days. It was before my time, but my Dad assured me that on the club-house roof there were mirrors through which the starter had to do his best to judge whether the fairway was clear.
However, once this obstacle has been overcome, players are released on to a pleasant undulating course that wends its way from the town out to its most westward beach and back again. In the wind it’s a swine, but on a balmy spring day it’s one of life’s great pleasures.
And yet as we made our way towards the turn, I could sense that there was an invisible cloud hanging over us, or over Mac the Dentist at least. Actually, I had sensed it the night before over dinner, when he had been quieter than usual. When he missed successive putts from under eight feet on the fifth, sixth and seventh greens, I knew for sure there was something on his mind.
‘Out with it,’ I demanded as we set off up the eighth. ‘What’s up?’ Jonny had pushed his drive to the right and was striding off after it. In step with the arrival of his baritone, he’d grown a hell of a lot over the winter; although he was still a few weeks shy of fourteen years old, he was as tall as his Granddad and catching up on me fast.
‘Nothing’s up.’
‘Dad,’ I told him, ‘the rest of your golf may be shite, but you are the best putter in Fife. You haven’t missed three on the trot like that in my lifetime.’
He looked at the ground as he walked and shrugged. ‘Ach, it’s my eyes,’ he muttered. ‘They’ve been playing me up.’
‘Bollocks,’ I retorted. ‘You spotted my second shot on the fourth when I’d lost sight of it. When we were driving through here you recognised that patient of yours in Pittenweem from three hundred yards away. What’s the score?’
‘You’re four up!’
‘Not that score. Cut the crap, Dad. Telling me porkies only serves to confirm it.’
He stopped and sighed. ‘Okay, there is. But let’s not talk about it here, not with the boy around. Afterwards. Now come on, before we hold the course up.’ He trudged off after his drive, which he had carved way out to the left; I had laid up with an iron off the tee, the only one of the three of us to find the fairway.
His mood seemed to improve after that. His concentration on the greens did, that’s certain. He rolled in a few of his usual miracles and by the time we reached the seventeenth tee, he was only one down. He tugged his drive down the left and out of bounds, though, and that was curtains.
Since Jonny, playing off a handicap that would have to be revised, and quickly, had won our separate three-way points competition by that time, we agreed that we’d skip the eighteenth. Another of the pleasures of Elie is the pub near the fourth and final tees, placed strategically to lure those whose games have ended early, or on occasion those who lack the bottle to battle outwards into horizontal rain and gale-force winds.
We parked our clubs at the door . . . no worries: it’s that sort of place . . . and wandered in. If we had taken Jonny in with us, the licensee probably wouldn’t have minded, given the size of him, but I told him that while he might be tall enough to go into a pub, he wasn’t old enough. He’s an amenable lad, so he didn’t argue.
The lounge section was empty, and so we chose a table in the corner. I bought Jonny a pint of orange and lemonade, a bag of crisps and a filled roll, and took them outside, where I found him sat on the wheel of my Dad’s caddy-car, watching a match going up the fourth. Then I fetched a couple of pints of Eighty and four more rolls . . . it was still a while to dinner . . . and brought them across on a tray. I laid the plate on the table, put a pint in front of my Dad, returned the tray, sat down and growled, ‘Right.’
‘It’s nothing I can’t handle, son,’ said Mac the Dentist, abruptly.
‘If it’s making you play like that, you’re not fucking handling it. Now out with it.’
He gave another sigh, a huge one this time, and sagged back into his chair. He picked up his pint and looked at it. ‘I’m driving,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t be drinking this.’
‘We’ll get a taxi. Now out with it.’
‘There’s no putting you off, is there? What if I just refuse to talk about it?’
‘Don’t bother thinking about that; it’s not an option. Come on.’
He took a drink and a decision. ‘Okay, if you insist. I’m being blackmailed.’
I felt myself stiffen in my chair. ‘You’re what?’ It began as a roar, but I choked it down before the licensee took too much interest. ‘What do you mean?’
He leaned his head back against the pub window, and stared up at the ceiling. ‘The husband of a female patient came to see me,’ he began, his voice loud enough for me to hear, but not to carry across to the landlord. ‘This was three days ago, on Wednesday, my afternoon off; I’d treated his wife the day before.’ He paused and took another drink, and when he was finished, so was his pint. I went to the bar, bought him another and brought it back. Anger was welling up inside me, but I kept it in check.
‘Thanks, son.’ His tongue was loosening. ‘I did an extraction under sedation,’ he explained. ‘It’s unusual these days, especially in adults; most people just go for locals. But not this woman. She said she had a phobia, and that the only way she could do it was if I put her under. So I did, yanked her tooth, made sure that she had come round okay, and that was that. I told her to sit in the waiting room for a couple of minutes, but she said she was fine and went straight out the door.’ He paused to ingest some more ale.
‘Next day, her weasel of a husband came to see me, and said that his wife had made a complaint against me. She’d claimed that when she started to come round from the anaesthetic, she realised that her knickers were down by her knees, her skirt was up round her waist and that I was feeling her up.’
; ‘So why didn’t she scream?’
‘My question exactly. The husband said that at first it was like a dream to her, that I must have realised she was coming round early and straightened her up. Only she realised very quickly that she hadn’t been dreaming. As his story went on, she got out fast, went home and asked her husband to take a look at her. He said that he did, and saw, as he put it, “Clear signs of sexual interference.” Bastard! Bastards!’
‘So why didn’t he go straight to the police? While the knickers in question were still moist, so to speak.’
‘He said he wanted to spare you the indignity, you being a public figure and all that. He said he was sure I’d want to as well.’
‘By how much did he reckon you’d want to spare me?’
‘Fifty grand’s worth.’
‘Indeed,’ I heard myself say, my voice grating. ‘And if not?’
‘The police and the tabloids.’
My anger had turned into rage, but not the kind that shows on the outside; this was like a great cold ball inside me, growing all the time. Then the obvious occurred to me.
‘Wait a minute. You must have had a doctor there to give the anaesthetic. Surely he’ll kick all this into touch.’
‘Oh, I did; technically I wasn’t anaesthetising the woman, only sedating her as I said, but I had Arthur Matthews in to do it. But that’s the trouble. He can’t back me up. He gave her the nitrous oxide all right, but the patient was no sooner under when his mobile went. A kid had been knocked down in the street, and he was the only doctor handy. He could see that everything was all right with the woman and he knows me well enough, so we agreed that he should get along there pronto. I never thought for a minute that I might be setting myself up, but I bloody well should have. I’m an idiot, son, and I know it.’
Unnatural Justice (Oz Blackstone Mysteries) Page 2