Quintin Jardine - Deadly Business

My only reaction was a smile, but I felt that for the first time I’d had a flash of the real Duncan Culshaw.

I drove straight home, dug out the rarely used MacBook laptop that I keep as a back-up for my computer, took it out on to the terrace, with Charlie, our Labrador, for company, and plugged the stick into one of the USB sockets. There was only one document on it, a large PDF file, titled The Mask . When I clicked on it, a box came up on the screen advising me that it was read only and that I would not be able to copy or edit it. ‘Fine,’ I muttered, and clicked the button to proceed.

There was no foreword, only the title, author’s name and a copyright declaration. I turned to the first page and started to read.

‘My wee brother?’ she began, then paused, as if she was framing every word in her eventual reply.

‘He was like a loch on a fine summer’s day. Not a mark, not a ripple on his surface. You looked at him and you thought, he’s one of the fairest things I’ve ever seen. And he was, the boy I grew up with.

‘But then life took a hold of him and the water was disturbed, choppy at first, and then rougher, till it was storm-tossed, white-crested. He was still beautiful, but in a different way, darker, ominous, and you knew that not far below that surface there was another man, someone different, someone dangerous, like the monsters of legend given form.’

As she spoke, Lady Doreen March’s plain but strong face seemed to change, to weaken, to crumple, and her voice began to crack. And as she finished, there were tears running down her cheeks, cutting ravines in her make-up.

I sat bolt upright in my chair. ‘What the fuck is this?’ I shouted, loud enough for Charlie to bark, his fur rippling, readying himself to defend me from attack, even though he couldn’t see the threat.

‘Doreen March?’ I said, more quietly. ‘Ellie?’

He’d changed a name, but only by a couple of months. ‘My wee brother’ was always how Lady Ellen January referred to Oz. Lady January, wife of a Scottish Supreme Court judge, formerly Ellen Sinclair, born Ellen Blackstone, is my Tom’s aunt, and she remains my good friend.

That surname surely had to be an alias for her, but as for the rest, Ellie is the most down-to-earth woman I’ve ever met. She’s never spoken like that in all the time I’ve known her; moreover, she never wears any make-up to speak of, and the Stone of Destiny is more likely to shed a tear than she is.

I realised that I was shaking, and that my heart and respiration rates were way above normal. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and waited until I had restored myself to a state of calm. When I opened them again, I saw Charlie, looking up at me. If a dog can frown and show concern, that’s what he was doing.

I had slammed the MacBook closed, as if I was running away from its contents, putting it to sleep in the process. I waited for it to come back to life, then read the second chapter.

‘My son?’ Frail old Michael Greystock sighed. ‘He broke my fucking heart. All I ever wanted was for him to be a teacher like me, but no, not him.’

If Doreen was Ellie, then Michael Greystock had to equal Macintosh Blackstone, a dentist, not a teacher, who had threatened both his kids with fire and brimstone if they ever entertained the idea of following him into his profession. As for frail, the guy’s had a heart-valve replacement but he’s still capable of two rounds of golf a day.

‘No, he had to go off to be something he never really was. First to Edinburgh, with his silly country notions of fame and fortune on gold-paved streets, then to bloody Spain, then to Glasgow, chasing that stupid dream. And him being him, eventually he caught up with it. He did have a gold star set in some fucking pavement in Los Angeles. As far as I know it’s still there, but he isn’t. It turned out to be a shooting star and, like they all do, it burned itself out.’

I laughed out loud. This was supposed to be Mac, Tom’s rock-solid Grandpa Mac coming out with all this fanciful shite?

‘But it wasn’t his fault,’ I read on, aloud. ‘It was that woman. She came into his life and she beguiled him. She cast her spell on him, like a witch, and the poor guy hadn’t a fucking chance after that. It was that Phyllis woman; the first time he ever brought her to my house, I had a premonition not just that she would take him from me, and from all the other people who loved him, but that she would be the end of him. If I could play that scene again, that first meeting, I’d stab her through the heart, and take the consequences. They’d be worth it.’

‘Phyllis?’ I yelled. ‘Fucking Phyllis?’

‘Gobsmacked’ didn’t come close to how I felt. No, it didn’t. I tried to define my reaction at that moment, and could only come up with one analogy. I felt raped.

My mobile was in my hand without any conscious thought, and I was about to hit the button on Mac’s speed dial entry, when I stopped myself. ‘No,’ I told myself ‘let’s read it all.’

And I did. Chapter three quoted someone called Sheila.

‘He was damaged when I met him,’ the widow said. ‘He was still bereaved, but she hadn’t given him time or space to grieve properly over the loss of his precious soul mate. Some people, and by that I mean the odd obsessive fan, but mostly Phyllis’s famous politician sister and brother-in-law, still blame me for taking him from her, but I don’t give a shit about them, for what I was really doing was trying to save his life. She had her claws in him, as deep as she could sink them. I tried, but to be honest I never really could prise them loose.

‘I don’t know what happened to his first wife. “A tragic accident in the home”; that was how the papers described it, but I’m not so sure. There was a continuing state of warfare between his two women. At that time, Maureen was on top, but she’d only won a battle. The war ended with her death, the only way it ever could have. Accident? If that’s what “they” say, I’ll have to accept it, but really, “they” have no idea what Phyllis is capable of: she’s done time, for Christ’s sake. That’s why we retreated to Italy, to a house that I insisted should be made as secure as possible. I wasn’t afraid for my children while I had him, although that’s what I let him think. Truth is, I was afraid for myself, afraid of her.

‘When they told me he was dead, the first thing I felt wasn’t shock. Before that there was an instant when I felt relief, because finally I’d be free of Phyllis. Afterwards …

‘I was furious when I heard that he’d been cremated. They told me it had been necessary because of the heat in Guatemala, where he’d been making a video for his new album when it happened. The unit had a doctor with it; he certified that a congenital heart defect had been the cause of death, and I have no grounds to doubt that, and yet …’

I had to break off then; I was so angry that I could barely see the words on the screen, far less concentrate on them. I closed the laptop and kept it shut, until our evening had run its course, and Tom had gone to bed. Not for the first time, no, not by a long way, I was glad my boy was there to keep me on an even keel, and possibly to keep me from taking Charlie along to the Nieves Mar and setting him on the son-of-a-bitch Culshaw, although my distraction must have shown through, for he asked me a couple of times whether everything was okay. Although I assured him it was, I reckon he knew it wasn’t, but trusted me to tell him if and when I needed to.

I rarely drink spirits, but I mixed myself a gin and tonic and took it up to the terrace, back to the manuscript. I scrolled through it before getting down to the detail, and I saw quickly that after the three opening ‘testimonials’, the book became more conventional. When I did start to read again, it was clear that it was a mock biography, the life and times of someone called ‘Al Greystock’, rock star and tragic hero … or rather, anti-hero.