Quintin Jardine - Alarm Call

‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘Are you finished in there?’ She nodded.

In the shower, even though I was concentrating on keeping the spray away from my wound, I thought some more. Wallinger had actually known when we were going to Minneapolis, and what hotel we would be in. The second part of that problem wasn’t insurmountable; I’m rich, so he’d assume that I’d be in one of the best hotels. Phoning round them and asking a few questions wouldn’t take long. One phone call to his cop brother, if I was wrong in my assessment of Lieutenant John the Second, would have been even quicker, and could have got him all the information he needed. But how the hell did he know when we were going?

He could have been watching Prim all along; he could have tracked her to Scotland, then followed the two of us everywhere we went. It was pretty clear he’d been following our trail across North America, keeping one guess and one step ahead of us. But there was one catch in that theory. If he was cash-flashing Jack Nicholson, as I was certain he was, and he had been snooping on us in the UK, how had he got to Minneapolis ahead of us? No way could he have done that, as we’d been booked on the first available flight.

So that left two possibilities: either he had an accomplice in Britain who’d trailed us all the way up to the KLM desk at Glasgow, worked out the rest from there. . there are only a couple of ways to get to MSP from Scotland and via Holland is one of them. . then phoned him, or. . and this was the one I feared most. . he had a spy in my camp.

But who knew where I was going and why? Susie did; sure, and it was likely to be her, not. Audrey did, and so did Conrad; they were fairly new in our employ, but they’d been well vetted and neither of them had any obvious link to an obscure American actor. Mark Kravitz knew, but he was my man even more than Connie was. Suppose he could have been bought, who’d have known to buy him? Mark operated in the shadows.

‘Miles would have known.’ I said it aloud, and was rewarded with pain as I forgot myself and let the shower jet hit my stitched-together ear. And why the hell, I asked myself, would mega-rich Miles Grayson get involved in a conspiracy to extort from his sister-in-law the sort of money that he would regard as small change? Did he and Dawn hate her that much? Rubbish, I told myself.

‘But still,’ I mused. ‘Wallinger: actor; LA connection.’

Roscoe Brown. Roscoe knew my travel plans. Roscoe was an actors’ agent and had been for some years. Did Roscoe know Paul Wallinger?

I turned off the jet, grabbed a towel and began drying off, as quickly as I could. As soon as I’d got myself down to merely damp, I wrapped myself in the hotel’s towelling robe to finish the job, went out to the living room and set up the laptop again. I didn’t bother with the e-mail this time. I went straight on to Roscoe Brown’s website and did what he’d challenged me to do a week or so before: I pulled down his client list.

It was extensive, built up through his years in the business. We were all there, from Adams to Zederbaum, like he’d said, but I was only interested in one letter. I clicked on the Ws and there he was, right at the top of the list. . Paul Patrick Walls.

Prim had come into the room, behind my back. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

‘Just possibly, honey,’ I told her, ‘I’m pulling someone’s world down on his fucking head. . and maybe if some contracts aren’t signed yet, on my own too!’

I was seriously pissed off with flying. Whatever happened in Westwood Village, I knew that my next port of call had to be Las Vegas, which was within a drivable distance, so I went online to Hertz, gave them my gold member number and booked a Jaguar S-type, with satellite navigation, for collection at Los Angeles airport.

That was a positive move after a week of uncertainty, and so I felt a little better as we checked out of the Campton Place. A local television station had found out where I was, and there was a crew outside as we got into our car. They got some footage of Prim, but the reporter wasn’t clued up enough to ask who she was, so I wasn’t worried about it turning into a story. They were only going through the motions anyway: already I was old news.

I fretted about Roscoe all the way to the terminal and on to the flight. Security there was worse than it had been anywhere else, even for those of us travelling at the front of the plane, so that didn’t help. Add all that to my still aching head. . fuck me, I’d been shot less than twenty-four hours earlier. . and calling me irritable would have been a major understatement. Prim read this and knew me well enough to keep quiet. When a guy recognised me in the departure lounge and approached me, I froze him with a stare; he actually apologised to me, when all he’d wanted to do was shake my hand and thank me for the day before.

I’d forgotten, and so had Prim, that it would be significantly hotter in LA than it had been in San Francisco, or anywhere else we had stopped that week. We were both in denims, so the transfer to the Hertz pick-up point was a steamy ordeal. As soon as we were in the S-type I switched the air-conditioning on at full blast; and we sat on the tarmac for a few minutes, our shirts unbuttoned, enjoying the refrigerated breeze.

When we were comfortable I programmed our destination into the navigation system and set off, taking every turn it told me to take without question. I felt a strange wave of relief just to be driving again: five days of Charles, Carmen, and assorted taxi-drivers is a lot for anyone, even someone with a less frayed temper than mine was by then.

The city of Los Angeles is an enormous place, but we were lucky in that Westwood Village is relatively close to LAX. The system instructed me to take Century Boulevard, then switch to the Four-Oh-Five freeway, and finally to join Wilshire Boulevard. We arrived at our hotel in under twenty minutes.

The Century was not the poshest hotel we’d been in that week, but it was okay, less than a mile from the meeting place Wallinger had specified, and it had an underground park where I could dump the Jag. It’s the oldest building around on that part of Wilshire, but it has a Spanish feel to it that makes up for its age. They gave us what they called a suite, on the first floor with a balcony that overlooked a central courtyard that would have been shaded if the sun hadn’t been directly overhead. It was cramped, but it had two enormous beds and a bathroom. When I saw how small it was I asked Prim if she wanted her own room, but she shook her head. ‘If you were going to take shameless advantage of me,’ she said, ‘you’d have done it last night when you crawled drunk into my bed. But you didn’t so I reckon we’re both safe.’

I was okay with that, not because I wasn’t worried about Susie any more but because I had the irrational hope growing within me that somehow the whole business would be sorted that day, I could send Prim on her way, and make my own to Vegas.

I took a long, cool shower in the cramped bathroom, to freshen up and to get my circulation going properly, then dug out my lightest shirt and a pair of Lacoste shorts that I’d packed with Vegas in mind. In those, and a pair of Panama Jack sandals, no socks, I felt dressed for the city. I looked at my suitcase and saw yet another reason for getting to my base camp in the Bellagio: more than half of its contents were destined for the hotel laundry.

By the time Prim had got herself ready. . her case was smaller than mine; I hated to think what it was like inside … it was after two o’clock, but I wasn’t worried about the time. I was worried about her, though: she was starting to get twitchy again, impatient, irritable and anxious to get going. We had plenty of time, but I kept her happy; I still had all the headache I needed.