‘And?’
‘It was a bug.’
‘As in a listening device?’
The Professor looked around before he nodded. ‘That was my first impression, though I couldn’t believe it because it was so tiny. Anyway, I took it to Joe Butler, head of Informatics up at the University. He used to work for… well never mind, that’s probably classified. Suffice to say, he told me it was definitely a bug and state of the art. So state of the art he was sure it had to be Government hardware.’
‘And we needed to come here for you to tell me that?’
‘If your client is bugged…’
‘You think I may be too?’
‘I don’t know. I do know that, whereas I previously said that a drunk falling in the canal and drowning wasn’t headline news, it isn’t really all that common either. I’m guessing it’s even less common that when they do fall in they’re wearing space-age audio surveillance equipment.’ The Professor waited until the kid in the armbands had thrashed his way past us again, not so much swimming as beating the water into submission. ‘Listen, Robbie, I want nothing to do with this, okay? If there is some defence of the realm, official secrets stuff going on, I want no part of it. I just thought you should know and wanted to tell you somewhere I didn’t think anyone could listen in.’
‘Do you have it with you?’ I asked.
‘In my locker.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘There’s someone I’d like to show it to.’
31
‘Some bosses let their staff leave work early on a Friday.’ Joanna picked up one of the shirts that was strewn across my bed and held it up to the light. ‘It’s the week before Christmas. I’ve better things to do than…’ She held the shirt to her nose and gave it a sniff. ‘What kind of soap powder do you use?’
‘None. Not yet,’ I said. ‘These shirts are out of the wash basket. I can’t remember which one I was wearing last Tuesday.’
‘You got me here to sift through your dirty laundry?’ Joanna threw the shirt onto the bed again.
‘The washing machine’s been busy with Tina’s clothes. I’ve not got around to my stuff yet.’
I’d made the mistake of packing my daughter’s suitcase too early. All that happened was that she’d got everything else dirty, which meant I had to take all the stuff out of the suitcase so she had something to wear and then wash it all again so that it was fresh for Mickey Mouse.
Joanna picked up the shirt, more carefully this time. ‘Is this really how it is for you? Every day must be a nightmare, having to decide which white shirt to wear. At least if you mixed up your colours a little you might remember the one you had on when you were at Stewart Street.’
My dad came in. ‘What are we looking for?’ I went to the cupboard under the stairs and returned with a rolled-up towel. I spread it out on the bed to reveal a matchbox given to me by Professor Bradley. Inside, on a bed of cotton wool, lay the tiny listening device found on Billy Paris.
‘Small, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘What is it?’
I placed it back inside the matchbox. ‘A bug,’ I said, after I’d rolled it up in the towel again. ‘This one was found on Billy Paris’s shirt collar. Call me paranoid, but I think one of these might have been planted on me too.’
‘Who by?’
‘The cops.’
‘Whoah.’ My dad was not having any of that.
‘Not your mob. Ministry of Defence cops.’
That clarified, he shrugged. ‘They’re sneaky enough, I suppose.’
‘Let’s think this through,’ Joanna said. ‘They’ve been to the office twice and you’ve been to the police station once. Billy Paris must have got his at Stewart Street because that’s the only time the cops knew where he was. Did you see them do anything funny to him when you were there?’
I hadn’t. Billy was already in the interview room when I arrived. Anything could have happened before then. Nor could I think of any contact between myself and the cops. I’d gone into the room, I’d sat down and… ‘I took off my jacket. I hung it over the back of the chair, but Christchurch… That’s the D.I,’ I said for my dad’s benefit, ‘he took my jacket and put it on a chair at the other side of the room.’
‘That’ll have been your grey suit,’ Joanna said. ‘How many of those have you got?’
‘Currently, I have a suit for every day of the week,’ I said, taking off the jacket I was wearing. ‘And this is it.’ I laid it on the bed. The three of us pored over it, feeling every inch of the cloth.
‘Found it!’ From the collar of my suit, Joanna gently removed a bug identical to that in the matchbox. She placed it on the palm of her hand. It was black, slightly bulbous at one end and with a thin tail that came to a sharp point. The whole thing couldn’t have been more than five millimetres long and when the tail was embedded in the fabric of my suit, just at the collar, it was practically invisible. ‘It looks a bit like a…’
‘Like a what?’ my dad asked.
Joanna hesitated.
‘Like what?’ my dad repeated.
‘Like a spermatozoa… Obviously a lot larger…’ Joanna had spent too much time studying forensic reports in rape trials. ‘Or a comma… Or—’
‘Or a tadpole that’s been on a diet,’ I said, trying to help, while at the same time thinking back to my walk through the streets of Glasgow with Billy Paris and what had been said. Anyone able to listen in would have picked up the fact that Billy knew who had killed Jeremy Thorn. They would have also heard him refuse to reveal that information to me. And then I remembered yesterday morning. I’d visited Billy’s ex-partner. Her words came back to me. Billy had also told her he knew the identity of the saboteur. But more than that, he’d told her he’d given the evidence to me.
A knock at the front door. My mind still racing, I answered it to a smartly dressed young man who I felt sure had more than one charcoal grey suit and half a dozen white shirts in his wardrobe. His smile was well rehearsed. ‘Robbie Munro?’ he said confidently.
‘Who wants to know?’
The young man held out a hand. ‘Alfie Platt. PA to Messrs Greg and Tony Glass.’
I recognised those names from somewhere. But where? ‘Who?’
The young man’s smile vanished. ‘Greg and Tony Glass,’ he said, as though his repeating the names would be enough for me. It wasn’t. ‘They’d like to meet you.’
‘Why?’ It was all becoming a little surreal.
I became aware of Joanna standing behind me. ‘It doesn’t matter why,’ she said. ‘We’re going to meet Glazed Over!’
32
I was a music lover and therefore not a fan of boy bands. Not that I was culturally illiterate. I had heard of Glazed Over. I knew the titles of their most famous albums and could hum the tunes of a lot of the tracks on them. I could also recite most of their lyrics given that they didn’t seem to use that many and those they did took a bit of a pounding. What I hadn’t bothered to learn was their actual names, favourite colours or star signs. Joanna had. Saturday morning we were taking her car, so as not to be shown up by the state of mine, and heading for St Andrews. The Glazed Over boys were playing in one of their regular pro-celebrity golf matches and had asked to meet me at the nineteenth. They’d teed off at ten o’clock to get the best of the light and so I’d arranged to be at the Old Course Hotel by three. Joanna was tagging along because I had no wild horses available to stop her.
‘Can you believe it? Glazed Over. Tony’s nice, but Greg…’ she sighed. ‘He’s just dreamy.’
‘Is he really?’
‘I know what you’re thinking. He’s not the best singer, and it’s Tony who writes most of the songs, the good ones anyway, but all the same, ding-dong.’ She licked the tip of a finger and flicked at an eyelash, checking it in the rear-view mirror.
‘Keep your eyes on where you’re going,’ I said, only too well aware of the occasional tatty bunch of roadside flowers, memorial to an inadvisable overtaking manoeuvre on the twists and turns between Kinro
ss and Auchtermuchty.
‘You’re very grumpy. What’s wrong? Missing your wee girl?’
That must have been it. Tina had phoned to say she’d arrived safely, but I’d hardly got a word in before my dad took over.
‘I’ll bet Greg is never grumpy,’ I said, feeling slightly queasy and putting it down to Joanna’s cornering.
‘Neither would I be. Not if I had his money.’
‘Money’s not everything,’ I thought I heard someone say in a voice very similar to my own.
‘I can’t wait to meet him. Do you think I’m looking okay?’ Joanna said, as though she’d ever not looked so much better than okay. ‘I thought at first I was maybe too informal, given that this is really a business meeting, and then I saw your linen suit and now I’m wondering if I’m too straight-laced? I don’t want Greg to think I’m the local librarian.’
Greg bleeding Glass. Oh, he’s so handsome, such a good singer and stinking rich too. I hoped he drove his golf ball into the Swilken Burn at the last, duffed a chip into the Valley of Sin and finished off with three puts.
Upon our arrival we came across quite a crowd hanging around the entrance to the Old Course Hotel. Inside wasn’t any quieter. We hacked our way through the swathes of autograph hunters to the reception desk, and when a few minutes later word of our arrival had filtered through, an immaculately attired Alfie Platt came to meet us in the company of a very large, black man wearing slacks and a houndstooth sports jacket that looked like it had been assembled by a group of tailors working from scaffolding. The Glass brothers’ gofer leading the way, their bodyguard bringing up the rear, we were escorted to a private elevator and from there to the Royal & Ancient suite on the top floor. Alfie swung the door open and with a sweep of his arm gestured for us to enter. ‘Mr Robert Munro and…’
‘Joanna Jordan.’
‘Mrs?’
‘Miss.’
Alfie started again. ‘Mr Robert Munro and Miss Joanna Jordan to see you, Sir,’ he said, like he was announcing our arrival at the court of the Sun King and not the hotel room of a couple of clapped-out popstars. At first I had no idea exactly who his grand introduction was aimed at, until I made out a pair of Pringle-patterned socks poking from one end of a period couch that was upholstered in a luxuriously thick, fern-patterned, two-tone fabric.
‘Thanks, Alfie.’ The socks disappeared and in a moment a tousled-headed man of about my own age stood, smiling across the room at us. Beyond him a floor-to-ceiling window looked out on to the seventeenth green. The Road Hole was said to be the most difficult hole of golf in the world. I was yet to find an easy one.
‘Thanks, boys, I’ll give you a bell if I need anything,’ Mr Socks told our escorts, and with that Alfie and man-mountain in a sports coat backed out of the room.
While he’d been addressing the staff, I’d taken the opportunity of clarifying with Joanna just which of the Glass brothers this was. I knew there were two, them being twins, and that one was thin and camp with black hair. This had to be him. The other was blonde, taller, more athletic. It was their names I couldn’t attribute.
‘Tony,’ Joanna told me out of the side of her mouth. He seemed pleasant enough. He was wearing a pair of vibrant pink trousers and a darker pink jersey over a white polo shirt.
‘Robbie, Joanna, come away in,’ Tony said. ‘We just finished our round ten minutes ago. The rain kept off for sixteen holes, lashed down for the last two, but, hey, that’s the danger of playing in December and you can’t play the Children’s Hospice Christmas celebrity match-play in the summer can you?’
He invited us to sit, which we did on a couple of Edwardian armchairs either side of a low Italian marble table that was scattered with golf tees, markers and sweet wrappers.
‘Greg’s in the shower,’ he said, ‘and the wives…’ Did a guy who wore pink trousers have a wife? ‘They’ll have gone for lunch and then hit the spa. Watching me and Greg play golf, even at the home of golf, is just another day at the office for them. They show face at the first tee for the cameras and then disappear.’
‘How’d your round go?’ I asked, after he’d offered and we’d accepted a glass of sparkling mineral water.
‘Pretty terrible, as usual,’ he said, twisting the cap off a bottle of spring water. ‘One day I’ll break ninety, but not today. What did you make of Alfie?’
‘Alfie? You mean your... what is he? A butler?’
Tony laughed. ‘He’s our new PA. Slightly over-the-top, don’t you think?’ Over-the-top? The guy was moustache-twirling, leaping out of a trench blowing a whistle with a service revolver in his hand, over-the-top. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll tone him down. He’s really extremely efficient. He found you quickly enough for us.’
‘Hi.’ A man I took to be Greg Glass entered the room and stood under the crystal chandelier, one hand leaning on the dining table, the other holding a bottle of German lager. I say I took him to be the other half of the singing, now golfing, duo, but only because the other was sitting a couple of metres away. I certainly wouldn’t have recognised him. What I vaguely remembered from years gone by was a head of wavy blonde hair, tight-fitting clothes and an athletic physique. Not a shaved scalp, white-towelling dressing gown and a torso that looked to be expecting twins of its own.
‘Greg, this is Robbie and his colleague Joanna,’ Tony said.
Greg gave us a friendly salute, took a long swig from his bottle of beer and dropped onto the couch next to his brother. ‘Never,’ he paused to burp, ‘play golf with a hangover. You a golfer, Robbie?’
I admitted that I had been known to swing a golf stick on occasion.
‘Any good?’ Tony asked, to which question I could only shrug modestly. When it came to golf I had plenty to be modest about.
Greg rolled the cold bottle along his brow and groaned. ‘Ever play the Old Course?’ I had, once, many years before. ‘How’d you do?’
Terrible, would have been the historically accurate answer. It had been blowing a gale off the Eden estuary that day, but you didn’t turn down the chance of a round at St Andrews.
‘I almost got blown away, but I did narrowly miss out on a spectacular hole-in-one at the eighth by only a couple of shots,’ I said.
Greg grunted a laugh. ‘The East Neuk of Fife. Best golf in the world and some of the weirdest weather, eh?’
Tony took up the chat as his brother restored his electrolyte balance with another couple of slugs of beer. ‘We didn’t really want to play. It’s the first time we’ve had the clubs out since.... Look, it’s good of you to come all this way, and so I’ll get straight to the point. We saw you on TV, Thursday night. Cherry Lovell’s investigation into the death of Madeleine and Jerry.’
That was the first time I’d heard anyone say the names of the crash victims that way around. Sometimes it would be Jerry and Madeleine. Mostly it was Jeremy Thorn and his fiancée.
‘And if there is a fee for this afternoon, I quite understand,’ Tony continued. ‘Just give the details to Alfie and he’ll sort everything out for you.’
‘Why do you want to know?’ Joanna asked the question I’d have asked myself if I hadn’t been wondering what kind of fee I might be able to wring out of a situation such as this.
Greg shoved the debris on the marble table to one side and put his feet up, hairy legs crossed at the ankles. ‘We want to find out if Robbie really knows who killed Madeleine and Jerry.’
The Glass brothers’ eyes were fixed firmly on me and there was silence in the room for several seconds, until Joanna asked, ‘You knew them well? Madeleine and Jerry?’
‘Maddy was our PA,’ Tony said. ‘Before Alfie.’
‘Long before that clown,’ Greg confirmed.
‘How much do you know about us and Philip Thorn?’ Tony asked. ‘Other than that Phil was the man who made us.’
‘We’d have made it without him,’ Greg interjected.
It was like watching a tennis match, the two of them sitting at opposite ends of the couch taking t
urns to talk.
‘I know, I know,’ Tony said. ‘But we can’t not recognise how much he did for us in the early days, even if it doesn’t mean that he owns us.’
‘If he had any decency he’d cut us loose,’ Greg said.
‘That doesn’t look like it’s going to happen any time soon,’ I said. ‘You and Thorn are on opposing sides of a civil court action, aren’t you?’
Back to Tony. ‘Yes, we’re making some rich lawyers even richer.’
‘But one thing’s for sure,’ Greg said, punctuating his words with another belt of beer. ‘I’m not letting Philip Thorn get his hands on Cut Crystal if it’s the last thing I do.’
I felt I shouldn’t have to ask, but I did. ‘Cut Crystal ?’
‘Greg and Tony’s musical,’ Joanna said, patiently, as though I was her senile uncle or a 1960s High Court judge being advised that The Beatles were a popular beat combo.
Tony’s turn to serve. ‘But that’s not why we’ve asked you here. Madeleine and Jerry were our friends. Maddy was with us for six years. It might not seem that long a time, but she became like a sister to us. I don’t know anyone who ever met Maddy and didn’t just love her. Jerry, we’ve known forever. When we were first signed we were eighteen, Jerry was twenty.’ He allowed himself another sip of fizzy water, and in unison Joanna and I did the same. ‘In the early days, Jerry went everywhere with us, or maybe that should be we went everywhere with him. There were fast cars, nightclubs, drugs, women...’
‘Lots of women,’ Greg confirmed, with a final pull from the beer bottle and an accompanying release of gas. ‘I never thought Jerry would settle down, but when he met Maddy a few years ago it really looked like he would.’
‘Then along came Cherry Lovell.’ Tony placed his glass on the coffee table. ‘She’d been following the court action and wanted to interview Jerry who was pig-in-the-middle.’
I could pick up the story from there on. ‘Jeremy and Cherry became an item, got engaged and then—’
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