Quintin Jardine - Alarm Call

‘Since you were my fiancee at the time,’ I said, casually, ‘I don’t wish to know that.’ I’d often wondered why I wasn’t more upset when I found out about that incident. I dunno, maybe I saw the poetic justice in it.

Suddenly I wanted to get out of there: I put an arm around her shoulders and steered her towards the door, picking up her bag by the handle and carrying it rather than wheeling it behind me like a prat. As we walked towards the exit, she pressed herself against me for a second. ‘I forgot to say “thanks”, Oz,’ I heard her say.

‘Thank Susie, not me. If she’d said “no”, you wouldn’t be here.’

Prim said nothing at all on the way back to the house.

That was just as well, for I don’t really like to talk when I’m driving. Instead she listened to the music: I’d put some Brian Kennedy in the CD changer before I left. He’d been a favourite of hers from the moment I’d introduced them, but I hadn’t chosen him for that reason.

He’d sung himself hoarse by the time we got there, and had been replaced by Ry Cooder and Manuel Galban playing mambo music: my recently acquired taste, but she seemed to like that too. She whistled as she stepped out of the car and saw my home. ‘Very grand for a boy from Enster,’ she exclaimed.

There was a squeal from the playground, followed by a yell of ‘Daddy!’ as a red-haired bundle came rushing towards us. I scooped her up in my arms. ‘But not for this one,’ I replied. ‘Hey, kid, say hello to your auntie Prim, by name if not nature.’ My daughter’s response was a frown, rather than her usual bold grin; it was funny, but looking back at that moment, it was as if she recognised her as someone who had come to set ripples in the calm ocean of her existence.

‘Hello, Janet,’ said Primavera. ‘Don’t you look like your mother? You won’t remember me, but I came to see you when you were a baby.’

‘And that went down like a lead balloon,’ I told her, ‘so don’t let’s mention it inside.’

At that moment, the door opened. I hadn’t expected Susie to come to greet us, but she did. I marked that down as a big gesture on her part, and so did Prim, for her face changed again. Uncertainty was something else I’d never known her to show before. Then my wife said, ‘Come here,’ and the two of them hugged. For all the nonsense, they’d been on decent terms in the past. Of course, Prim started crying again, didn’t she? This time I left her to Susie to sort out.

‘Hey,’ I heard her say, as she swept her inside, ‘there’s no need for that. Come on; I’ll show you your room and you can lie down for a bit.’ Take me back five years and tell me that I’d wind up watching that scene and I’d have called you crazy.

I felt unsettled as I led Janet back to her tree-house, and for the first time, a little annoyed. I knew, I just knew, that something I did not want or need was about to erupt into my life. And it was my own bloody fault for being soft enough to invite it in.

When I was back indoors, after handing Janet back to Ethel, I went through to the office conservatory. Audrey was there on her own, so I guessed either that Prim was still ‘lying down’ or that Susie had reached the same conclusion as I had, namely that a drink would be more therapeutic.

There was a new document on my side of the desk. ‘Everett’s movie?’ I asked. Our secretary nodded. I picked it up: it had a project number on the first page, that was all. Industrial espionage is a big part of movie life: clearly the big man knew that much about the business already. For all my wife’s leaning on me, I still wasn’t that keen on the idea, but I picked it up and began to glance through it.

I looked at the plot outline, then the shooting schedule, and saw right away that my potential part was a wee bit more than a cameo, as it had been described: I was only in around ten per cent of the scenes, but they were all quite lengthy and half of them were at the end.

I started to read through the script, or at least the sections that were of direct interest to me. It wasn’t exactly Ingmar Bergman, but Everett’s audience were more the action-before-intellect type, and by those standards it read okay. Well, no, that’s not true: it read terribly, but with a bit of imagination, a bit of inflection here and there, backed up by good direction and editing, I reckoned that it would be okay. Whether I was in it or not, I didn’t want my friend’s first venture to be an embarrassment.

I was into the second scene when the door opened and the former and current Mrs Blackstones came in. They were both carrying tall glasses. . Susie’s looked like orange juice, but I took a guess that Prim’s was Bacardi and tonic, unless she’d changed her tastes as well as her appearance.

My wife motioned me to follow, turning on her heel and leading the way from the office across to the conservatory wing on the west side of the house, where the pool is. Afternoon had given way to evening, but it was still warm in there: all the doors to the garden were open and the roof vents too, yet the automatic air-conditioning was still blowing.

‘Where’s my drink?’ I grumbled, as the women settled into the wicker seats, set round the glass-topped table.

‘In the fridge,’ said Susie, pointing to the big cooler that we keep out there. I opened it, chose a bottle of a Belgian beer known colloquially as ‘wife-beater’, and joined them.

I looked at Prim. She had changed out of her travel clothes into a light top-and-trousers outfit, city gear rather than country: once again, this was someone I felt I knew only slightly.

‘Okay,’ I said, quietly. ‘Let’s hear it.’

She glanced at the floor, then at the shimmering surface of the pool. Finally she looked across at me. ‘Two years ago,’ she began, ‘well, no, it’ll be a bit more than that now, I met a man.’

In spite of myself, I grinned. ‘When do we get to the surprise?’ Susie fetched me a look that was the equivalent of a clout round the ear. ‘Sorry, go on.’

‘You know that I went back to nursing, after the last time I saw you, that is?’

I nodded. ‘Dawn told me. She said it was to let you get your head back together, and to recover some of the old family values.’

A corner of her mouth flickered. ‘Did you believe that?’

‘I believed that Dawn believed it, and I even gave you the credit for believing it at the time yourself.’

‘But you couldn’t see it lasting?’

‘To be honest, no: I reckoned you’d get bored before long and be off on your travels again.’

‘Since you’re that bloody clever, it’s a pity you didn’t tell me!’

‘We were each other’s keepers for long enough. Plus, we were in the process of getting divorced, remember. So, how long did it take you to get bored out of your scone?’

She smiled wistfully and scratched her chin. ‘It took a couple of months for me to realise why I’d left the profession in the first place, and another couple before I was going bats. I couldn’t go back home, though. My mum had made a good physical recovery from her cancer, but she was still preoccupied with it emotionally, and she didn’t need to be lumbered with my mid-thirties crisis. As for my father. . Oz, you know him, you know what he’s like.’

Yes, I know David Phillips: he’s a very nice, kind man who’s been content to let his wife and daughters rule most of his adult life. He is also from the Planet Zog.

‘So you packed a bag, quit your job and disappeared into the night?’ I prompted.

She scrunched up her eyebrows, as if she was pinching back more tears. ‘I should have, months before I actually did, that is. I should have gone off to Africa or the US or wherever … And yet even now when I say that I don’t mean it.’