Quintin Jardine - For The Death Of Me

I lay there for a while, still naked, wondering what the hell I’d done, and where it was going, if anywhere. I think I began to feel ashamed, but as it turned out I didn’t have time to dwell on it.

To divert my thoughts, I picked up the television remote and switched it on. The hotel menu popped up on screen; I pushed a number at random and found myself watching more bloody baseball. I moved on to the next channel.

‘Blackstone.’ My name came out at me; I was watching the local CBS station and they were talking about me. ‘I repeat,’ said the announcer, ‘our breaking news story. English movie star Oz Blackstone is believed to have died tonight when a private jet crashed in a New Jersey swamp, en route for Newark Airport.

‘He was one of four passengers on the chartered Gulfstream when it came down. Emergency services report that so far five bodies have been recovered, those of the two pilots, the flight attendant, a woman as yet unnamed, and the promising New York mystery writer, Mr Benedict Luker. Police and fire-fighters are still searching for the remains of Mr Blackstone and of his former wife, Mrs Primavera Blackstone, the sister of Oscar-nominated Dawn Phillips, wife of Miles Grayson. More news and pictures on this story as it develops.’

I suppose I knew then that Marie wasn’t coming back. In fact, I guess I knew everything, although it was quite a while before I was able to lie down, quietly and with something approaching rationality, and put all of the pieces together.

At that moment, though, I was struck down, numb with grief. Primavera was dead. I could have stayed behind for another night in Trenton with her, rather than with Marie. I had been thinking about that in the State Capitol building, and so had she. If either of us had come out with it, said what we were thinking, given voice to our unquenchable lust for each other, then Marie would have been catching the plane back to her father, and Prim would be alive today.

And Maddy was dead: I’d gone to all that trouble to save her life, I’d thought I’d triumphed, but after all my efforts to save her from the gangsters she was still stone dead, crisped in a swamp in New Jersey that had been a Mafia dumping ground for decades. That’s a fine irony for you, Blackstone, is it not?

Dylan? Yes, he was dead too, but he’d been fucking dead for years.

The television was still droning on: they had moved on to the day’s death toll in Iraq, but I had my own casualty list to grieve over. I forced myself into action. I got up, showered and dressed. Then a horrible thought struck me. I snatched up my cell-phone and called Susie.

It was Conrad Kent who answered. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, before I’d had a chance to speak, ‘Mrs Blackstone is not taking calls.’

The media jackals were gnawing at my corpse already. ‘Shut up,’ I shouted at my assistant. ‘This is Oz. I wasn’t on that fucking plane. Now put me on to my wife.’

It took me a while to calm Susie down. It took me a minute or so to believe truly that it was me speaking to her. Christ, I was so fucked up in my head that I wasn’t even a hundred per cent sure myself.

‘What happened?’ she asked, when she could speak properly.

‘The plane must have been sabotaged, somehow. It was flying Maddy to safety but the Triads got to it.’

‘So they killed her, after all.’

‘Yes, but she wasn’t the target,’ I told her, even as the first significant part of the truth hit me, clear and ringing as a bell. ‘Mike was.’

The rest of it didn’t even begin to come together until I made it back to New York, driving, dangerously, through the fog that seemed to have spread inside my head. Everything was instinctive. I don’t remember anything about the journey. The navigation system was switched off, but I made it on my personal auto-pilot, just heading north and taking signs as they came up.

I must have been burning rubber for it was just after midnight when I drove out of the Lincoln Tunnel and on to Manhattan. I dumped the car in a Hertz drop-off location somewhere in the Forties, shoved the keys and papers at the receiving clerk without a word, took my bags and almost stumbled into the night. I was headed anywhere but towards the Algonquin: I wanted never to go back there, ever again. Still I don’t, and I won’t.

I walked across to Broadway, then headed south. It was early Monday morning and the city was as quiet as it ever gets, so quiet that some idiot tried to mug me. He was standing in a doorway just past Thirty-eighth; as I passed he pointed a gun at me and told me to give him my wallet. I looked at him, and considered his options. He didn’t look drug-crazy enough or scared enough to shoot me, so I snatched the pistol from him, pushed him back deeper into the doorway and beat him bloody, then shoved the barrel up his arse. I’m speaking literally here, folks. I told him, although I doubt if he was hearing anything, that if I turned and saw him crawling out on to the street I’d come back and pull the trigger, then I carried on in my aimless way.

Finally it dawned on me that I’d better get off the street before I killed somebody, so I checked myself into a hotel on West Thirty-second, just past the Empire. It wasn’t much better than a flophouse, and they gave me a room next to the lift-shaft. I don’t even remember now what it was called, but it had four walls and a roof, and that was all I wanted. As I lay there in the dark, the shock began to wear off. I began to come to terms (whatever the hell that actually means) with my grief, and I revisited it with a vengeance.

I cried for a while, for quite a while, for Primavera and for the times we had shared together, the good, the bad, the thrilling, the exciting, the downright scary. I cried for the love we had made, and for Tom. Soon I was going to have to tell him that he’d never see his mother again, other than in dreams. I’d try to find the positive side for him, though, when he was old enough, that he’d always see her young and beautiful, and that he wouldn’t have to watch her dynamism fade, and her body weaken and wither with age. I never saw that in my mother. I’d never see it with Jan, and I’d never see it with Prim.

It’s a terrible curse, being married to me: it’s as if you seal your fate when you sign the contract. I have been married three times and two of my wives have died prematurely, at the cold emotionless hand of Fate. Now I live my life in a constant state of fear for Susie, and with the dread that she might carry it too. I’ve found myself wondering whether I should leave her, for her own good, to try to protect her. But that didn’t do Primavera any good, did it?

I thought of all these things as I cried myself out, and then I began to think of what had brought them about, and I began to see more of the truth, beyond that first flash that I’d revealed to Susie.

First and foremost, I knew for sure that Sammy Goss hadn’t met us by accident: he’d been sent. Someone had noted my arrival in Sing, someone who knew all about Maddy January, and made the connection with me. Once Goss had latched on to me he hadn’t let go.

Only it had been more complicated than that. Something unexpected had happened. Someone entirely unlooked-for had turned up, and changed some people’s priorities.

I knew all these things: they followed a logical and inescapable pattern, yet it was all theory, all fucking Sherlock stuff, with no hard evidence, no reinforced concrete proof.

And yet there was, and I nearly threw it away.

I forced myself upright at eight fifteen next morning. The water pressure in the shower above my bath, its enamel worn almost through by countless thousands of feet, was so poor that it took me ten minutes to do the job according to my standards. I didn’t bother to shave: I wasn’t ready to look at myself in the mirror.