Quintin Jardine - On Honeymoon With Death

‘Sure you do, Steve. You spotted Susie and me in that restaurant and you photographed us. I clocked you then, but I couldn’t catch you. Then you had the idea of hanging around the house to see if you could get some really incriminating stuff. We left for Barcelona, you followed us, and you took that other one at the airport.

‘Great, thinks you. I’ll slip copies of these to Prim and that bastard Blackstone will be really in it. Congratulations, mate, I am, but so are you. Oh, how deeply you are in the shit!’

Miller looked up at me. ‘I didn’t take these,’ he squealed. ‘They’ve got nothing to do with me.’

‘Of course they have. Prim only got back yesterday morning, but she was a couple of days early; nobody knew about it. But you saw us last night, sitting in the window of La Dolce Vita. You knew she was home.’

‘Oz, I swear on my mother’s grave …’

‘Your mother isn’t bloody dead!’

‘All right, I swear to you on the grave of somebody who is. My grandmother, I’ll swear on her grave, I didn’t take those photographs.’ I reckoned he had a deal more swearing to do, though, before I started to believe him.

‘When were they taken?’ he asked.

‘You know damn well.’

‘Tell me.’

‘The Roser Dos shot was taken on Saturday night, the other one, yesterday morning.’

A huge smile of relief crossed his broken face. ‘Then I couldn’t have done it. I was on the golf course yesterday, with Frank, Gerrie and Maggie. We played a foursome at the Torremirona Country Club, up past Figueras. Ask them; they’ll tell you I couldn’t have been in Barcelona.’

Still I didn’t buy it; I suppose I wanted him to be the one, I wanted to punish someone and he was the easiest to fit in the frame.

‘So someone else took the second shot. So what? You got a pal to tail us and take it.’

He stared up at me. There was a lump the size of a pigeon’s egg above his left eye. ‘Oz,’ he said, in a sad voice that I just couldn’t doubt, ‘I don’t have any pals.’

I helped him up, the poor hopeless sod, sat him on his parents’ couch, stepped into the open-plan kitchen and made us two mugs of coffee. It turned out to be a foul own brand instant, but I didn’t care. Steve didn’t either; he was still slightly stunned, from my big righthander.

‘I’m sorry I shot my mouth off on Saturday, Oz,’ he mumbled. ‘Not very gentlemanly, was it? Not very clever either. My father’s told me often enough that I’d get myself really done over some day.’

I was relieved to find that the new model Oz Blackstone still had a conscience, of sorts. ‘It’s you who’s due the apology, mate,’ I told him. ‘Not just from me either. Prim owes you one as well; she worked you over worse than I did.’

He looked at me. ‘Mmm,’ he murmured. ‘Truth is, I guessed that when she agreed to come to Madrid with me, your leaving had a lot to do with it. Still, I hope you won’t thump me again if I say that one doesn’t look a gift horse, and all that. Good for any chap’s morale, when he lands a lovely like her, whatever the story.’

I tried to think back to a time when I had morale; it was difficult. Success doesn’t mean anything unless you feel it inside yourself. There was I, my name on billboards all over the States, and soon to be all over Europe too, and inside I felt like shit.

‘I’ll push my luck a bit further, shall I?’ Steve went on. He must have guessed that I was no longer dangerous by that time. ‘What possessed you to take a chance like that? I mean, old boy, be sure your sins will find you out, and all that.’

‘They sure will,’ I agreed. ‘As to what possessed me. . apart from the obvious. . that I have to figure out. There’s only ever really been one woman for me, Steve, and I even messed her about too. Now she’s dead, and I can’t tell her I’m sorry.

‘As for Prim, she and I got back together and got married because each of us thought that the other was a safe port in a storm. For different reasons, both of us were wrong.’

‘I take it that she’s gone, because of those photos, and that’s why you came knocking my door down.’

‘Yeah, she’s gone, and I don’t know whether she’s coming back.’

I’ve never been one for self-pity; I’m like my dad in that respect. I don’t wallow in it, I turn it into anger.

‘I do know one thing, though,’ I said, sincerely. ‘I am going to find the bastard who took those pictures, and when I do. .

‘Sure, it’s my own fault, I’ve been caught at the naughties. But I don’t care about that; when I find whoever it was shopped me, I’ll fucking well kill him. . Or at least, by the time I’m finished he’ll wish I had.’

‘Will that make you feel better?’ Steve asked me.

‘No,’ I answered, ‘but it’ll make him feel worse than I do, and that’s important to me.’

I left him there, the poor, battered Proton salesman, and headed back home. I stopped for petrol on the way, and was just leaving the gasolinera when my mobile phone sounded. I pulled into the car park of the furniture store across the road and answered the call. I found myself hoping that it was Prim, telling me that she had turned the Mercedes around and was coming back, but it wasn’t. It was my Other Woman.

‘Hi,’ said Susie cheerily. ‘I’m in the office, and I’ve just dictated a letter to you, inviting you to become a director of the Gantry Group. Today’s a no-lunch day, so I thought I’d give you a call and see how you’re doing on your own.’

‘Not very well,’ I answered. ‘Not very fucking well at all.’ I told her about Prim’s early return and about what had happened that morning. When I was finished, she was silent for what seemed like quite a while.

‘Oh dear,’ she sighed at last. ‘I must have been crazy to assume that she’d never find out. She’ll be after my blood, I suppose.’

‘Several pints of it. The least you can expect is a fairly ferocious phone call,’ I admitted. ‘I guess I should have called you, to warn you, but the red mist came down. As a result, I’m just on my way back from making a fool of myself yet again.’

‘How?’

‘Miller. I assumed it was him and I went to his place to give him another doing. It wasn’t.’

‘So who did take the photos?’

‘I haven’t a bloody clue, Susie; not yet, at any rate.’

‘Don’t go overboard when you find him, Oz. Promise me that.’

‘I’m promising nothing any more. Promises just get you into bother.’

‘What about the one you made to me? About looking out for me?’

I had actually thought about that. ‘That still stands, whether Prim comes back or not. I gave you my word.’

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I really am sorry. I never meant to mess things up between you two.’

‘What would you do differently in the same circumstances? ’ I fired at her.

‘Nothing.’

‘Me neither.’

‘Do you want to come over here?’ she asked.

‘No. We’ve been over that, and you were right.’

‘What about the new movie? What happens if Prim doesn’t come back, and tells Dawn and Miles why?’

‘Right now, I don’t give one damn. But we’re contracted, Miles and I, for one more picture at least, and he has an option on me for the one after that.’

‘Will she come back?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you want her to?’

I had been thinking about that, on and off, from the moment her car turned out of the driveway. ‘Susie,’ I replied, ‘you made it pretty clear that I’ve been misusing women all my adult life. I’ve got to start being honest with someone.’

‘Be honest with me, then. If Prim did leave, and I turned up again, would you throw me out?’