Quintin Jardine - For The Death Of Me

‘If you’re the sort of person who looks at life through rose-coloured spectacles, you’d have seen Primavera Phillips as a conventional angel, clad in white. But if you were to take them off, then paradoxically, you’d have seen her still angelic, but maybe clad in a different colour, for Prim had some of the fallen one in her too, or at least she tried to make it appear so.

‘She’s touched my life in more ways than I can explain. I know this: from the moment I met her, I became a different person, a deeper person, a stronger person. A better person? Others can decide that. But without Primavera, I wouldn’t have become what I am, whatever that might be, however you people see me as I stand here, unable to read my carefully drafted script for the tears in my eyes.

‘She’s touched your lives too, with the sheer excitement of being around her, with her mischief, with her devilment, but never with her badness, for despite all the things she saw and did. . and there have been a few which I could not possibly recount to you, not here in this place, nor in any other. . there was none of that in her. In spite of herself, in reality she was a wholly good person, and if she’d have liked to have been bad, well, she never quite made it, however hard she tried.

‘We’re not having a funeral today, because we have no body to commit, although we retain the hope that one day we might be able to do her that final honour. Still, where Prim rests right now, she shares that place with the likes of the fictional Luca Brasi, and maybe the real Jimmy Hoffa, and a few more similar characters. I find comfort in the knowledge that, in her wholeheartedly perverse way, she might like that idea.

‘Yes, she played the game of life with all her great heart, and usually she won. She and I may not have played it too well together, not all the time, but when we were good we were great and when we were less than good, what the hell? We still managed to make Tom. He’ll go down as her crowning achievement, and I promise you and her, I’ll make damn sure that her spirit burns on in him.

‘It was Kitty Wells who sang that it wasn’t God who made honky-tonk angels. I reckon that in at least one case old Kitty was wrong. So long, Primavera, from me, from our boy and from all of us who love you and who will never forget you.’

I heard them applaud in the church, and outside, but by that time I couldn’t see a single fucking thing.

Before all that came to pass, though, I did something else.

As soon as I’d tired the kids out playing with them, and that took a long time, I went off to my study, alone, and locked the door. My digital camera was in a drawer of my desk, where it usually resides because I always forget to take the bloody thing when I go on a trip. I took it out, connected it to my computer with a USB lead, then replaced the memory card with the one Maddy January had slipped to me.

I opened the software, and retrieved the images it held. There were only two. There was Harvey. . or Hard-on, as I would call him ever afterwards when we were alone. . in his father’s red robe and wig with a cigarette in one hand, a can of the inevitable Irn Bru in the other, and an erection as big as his smile.

And then there was the other. Shot through a window and amplified, it was a back view of someone whom I knew had to be Tony Lee, his head slightly bowed as if in supplication. Facing him solemnly across a table was a man whose face I’d come to know well during our very brief acquaintance: Jimmy Tan.

In the background, beyond him, there was someone else: her face wasn’t quite recognisable, but I knew her body and who she was too.

It had all clicked into place before that: the photo was just confirmation of what I’d known since Marie had left me in Trenton. Jimmy, the head of island security, had been aware of Maddy January’s background, and he’d known of her connection to me. When he saw my name show up on what was probably his routine list of VIP arrivals, he put two and two together and came up with the correct number, or one that was near enough to the mark. Until Dylan told him the truth in the Next Page, he may have thought that she had sent for me to help her, but that didn’t matter. Jimmy had put us together and that was enough.

He’d sent his tame Scots hitman to intercept me. I guessed that he’d staked out the hotel and had simply followed our taxi to the Crazy Elephant. Casually, during that first Saturday evening, Sammy had given me the tip to go to the Esplanade, and there Marie had been waiting to point me to Tony Lee.

He’d been a marked man himself, of course. He had to die with his wife, yet they knew he’d never betray her, and with him dead, how would they find her? Answer: by recruiting an unwitting mug like me to lead them to her.

But then, as I told you earlier, the simple game had changed, and had become much more complex.

First, Lee had been smarter than they had anticipated, sending Maddy out of Singapore and turning up to meet me himself. (He’d been right: if she’d gone to the Next Page, she’d have died there.)

Then Tan had been called in, not to bail me out of a nasty situation but directly by his old acquaintance Martin Dyer, the insider agent who’d gone down in flames in a shoot-out in Bangkok, of which Tan, the Triad chieftain, had known in advance, but had been unable, or maybe even unwilling, so devious was he, to prevent.

From that point, his prime objective had been to kill Dylan, the Interpol plant who had wrecked a Triad drug empire, and cost the lives of many men, but to do so in a way that nobody would ever uncover, by making him appear to be collateral damage in the death of Maddy January.

And in my death.

I had no doubt then and still have none, that Marie’s mission had been to see me on to that plane with the rest. But she had failed her father: she’d been unable to watch me go on board to die so she’d offered herself to make me stay with her in Trenton. Yet she almost failed. I would have died, I would have gone with them, had it not been for that voice in my head.

Jan’s message made me stay with her; I truly believe that Jan saved my life, from wherever she is now. You think I’m crazy? Tough shit.

How had Jimmy Tan reacted when he found out about his daughter’s weakness, I wondered? With indifference, I guessed. In his great secret life, who was I, and what could I prove?

He was right, every step of the way, and I’d shown him to be so when I’d fed the cops a fable in New York. As always, Jimmy Tan had won. He was still the most important man in Singapore, and maybe in the whole of South East Asia, and nobody knew, outside the highest strata of his Triad clan.

Jimmy Tan was a wise and cunning man, and he understood this. All knowledge is power, and that is demonstrably true. But there is one form that bestows supreme power on those who hold it, and that is knowledge of which no other living person is aware that its bearer is possessed.

I wiped the images, both of them, from the card.

It’s our plan now to winter in Los Angeles, every year. We’ll hire tutors for the kids to keep their education up to scratch, but I will not be parted from my family, ever. Where I go they go, and my schedule will be arranged to ‘make it so’, as Captain Picard always said.

I am now consumed by the need to be there to protect Susie all the time. It would be seen by others, if they knew about it, as quite manic. But that’s the way it is. The curse of being my wife is real and only I can keep it at bay by being around her wherever she is. As a result I’ve begun to acquire a reputation in the business for being very choosy about the projects I accept. Interestingly, that doesn’t bother Roscoe Brown at all: he says it makes directors all the more anxious to cast me, whatever my price.