Quintin Jardine: Screen Savers

‘And what’s that?’

‘You’re a jammy bastard. Somehow or other, whenever you take on one of these half-arsed investigation jobs you always seem to get a result.’

‘That’s true, but Michael, in the past I’ve known where to begin. Where the hell do I start here?’

He reached into a third pocket of his designer jacket and handed over yet another envelope. ‘That’s a list of former employees of the Gantry Group who’ve been asked to leave or been fired; a bit more than a dozen of them. The name at the top is Joe Donn, the Finance Director Susie had all that trouble with a couple of years back. I’ve run a quiet PNC check on them all. Two are currently in the slammer, so they’re out of the frame. Another three have convictions for minor offences; assault, breach of the peace and possession of marijuana. The rest look like choirboys.’

‘All men?’ I asked, without looking at the list.

‘All but two of them. One of them was a junior, into the petty cash. The other was Joe Donn’s secretary; she resigned after Susie caught her smuggling copies of documents out to her old boss. He was trying to make trouble for her by feeding information to a freelance journalist, but a pal of hers on the Herald business desk tipped her off.’

‘Is he still trying?’

‘No. The Gantry Group lawyer put a scare into him. When Donn left for the second and final time, his severance agreement included a standard confidentiality clause. The solicitor wrote to him making it clear that if he broke the agreement again, Susie would sue him for punitive damages.’

‘So you think that these letters might be another way of getting his own back. . by throwing a scare into the wee one?’

Dylan frowned. ‘Put it this way. If this was a police investigation, old Uncle Joe would be the first bloke in for interview.’

‘Thanks for that insight. Since you lot never get it right first time, I’ll probably start somewhere else.’

‘Cheeky bastard. You can start wherever you like, as long as you get a result.’

I thought about that as he spoke. I had never met old Joe Donn, but from everything I had heard, he struck me as something of a dinosaur. Not the sort of man who would have written poison pen letters on a personal computer, then printed them out on a laser. No, old Joe would have cut words out of the Daily Record and pasted them on to a page from a school jotter, just like he’d seen them do in the movies.

I didn’t share this with the detective inspector, though; it would have made me sound too much of a smart-arse.

‘I’ll do what I can, Mike,’ I said modestly. ‘There’s just one thing, though.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You sure you can afford my fee?’

After a spot of haggling, I settled for my lunch as a retainer, and another couple of pints on a successful conclusion. Not that I expected to collect them.

I had some hope that we might have lifted matching prints from the three envelopes, but Dylan knocked that on the head right away. He told me that he had them all dusted by a close-mouthed pal in the Strathclyde forensic department, and had come up blank. There were plenty of prints on the envelopes, naturally enough since the things had been through the Royal Mail system, but the only ones common to all three belonged to Susie herself.

I took them all back to the office anyway, with their contents and with Mike’s list of possible suspects. It was time to confess all to Primavera.

She sat in silence as I told her about Susie’s stalker. When I was finished, she turned to our assistant. ‘Go on out for a coffee for half an hour, Lulu,’ she said, quietly. ‘Take a fiver out of petty cash and nip along to Princes Square.’

She looked at me across her desk as the door closed, leaving us alone, and leaving me wishing I had gone for a coffee too.

‘Does that guy know what he’s asking?’ she exclaimed.

‘Probably not.’

I tried to appease her, but her temper was still on the up. ‘Oz, what has happened every time you and I have got involved in something like this? Disaster, and you above all know that. The first time, we got away by the skin of our teeth with our very lives-’

‘And with a lot of money.’

Prim shut me up with another look. Best let her get it off her chest, son.

‘As for the second time, if we hadn’t got involved with trying to authenticate that bloody picture-’

‘You might still be living in Spain with your ancient lover.’ She winced and looked away. I knew I shouldn’t have said it, but sometimes my mouth just goes haywire.

‘Yes, exactly,’ she said curtly, recovering herself. ‘And as for the third time, if Greg McPhillips hadn’t volunteered you for that escapade, then-’ She stopped abruptly, kinder than I had been, not voicing the truth with which I would have to live forever.

‘Mike must know all that, Oz.’

‘Not about you.’

‘Maybe not, but he was involved last time. He knows what happened, and why. So he must know now what he’s asking you to do.’

‘No, I don’t think for a second that’s occurred to him. This is his girlfriend who’s under threat, and he’s worried sick. . probably even more worried than he was prepared to let on. To tell you the truth, love, I’m really chuffed that he thinks well enough of me to trust me with this.’

I hesitated. ‘And anyway. .’ I began.

She cut me off. ‘. . and anyway, you enjoy it, all that private detective stuff. It gives you a buzz, gets you hard. Admit it, you’re a sucker for it, and Mike knew that when he called you. He knew you couldn’t turn him down.’

‘He knew I couldn’t turn him down, yes, but that’s not why. Two years ago the guy put his job on the line to help me. I owe him; simple as that.’

She frowned. ‘Is there anything I could say to make you change your mind? Any threat I could make? Any ultimatum I could give you?’

I sat on the edge of her desk, tilted up her chin and kissed her. ‘Sure there is,’ I whispered. ‘You could tell me you’ll leave me if I take this on. That would work. But you’re not going to do that, are you?’

She looked me in the eye for upwards of ten seconds; then she shook her head. ‘No, I’m not. Because I don’t believe in jinxes, and because you’re right. Your friends are in trouble, and if you can help them, you have to.’ She smiled, gently. ‘I love you for it, too. Just be careful, that’s all.’

‘Of course I will, but don’t get this out of proportion. The chances are that all I’m doing is running down a crank.’

‘You’ve got three weeks to do it, then.’

I frowned at her, puzzled.

‘Christ,’ she laughed, ‘have you forgotten already? Your movie career gets under way then.’ She pushed herself out of her chair, and picked up Dylan’s list from my desk. ‘Where are we going to begin, then?’

‘We?’

‘Sure. You don’t really think I’d let you handle this on your own, do you? Lulu’s pretty well trained now. It’s time she had a promotion and a rise. We’ll hire an assistant for her, and she can handle more of the interview workload. With one thing and another you’re hardly involved here any more: if I manage the quality of the operation, our clients won’t know the difference.’

My reassurances about the safety of Dylan’s mission had come back to bite me on the bum, well and truly. They seemed to have convinced Prim, okay; but I wasn’t so sure.

‘So come on,’ she insisted. ‘Tell me. Where do we start? With this man Joseph Donn?’

‘I don’t think so. Dylan thinks he’s the bookies’ favourite, but he has a recent history of sounding off to the press. This thing has to be done with no publicity, so we’ll have to be careful how we handle him. No, I reckon we should begin with his secretary, Myrtle Higgins. She lost her job for doing him a favour; could be she won’t fancy doing him any more.’