Quintin Jardine - Screen Savers

Prim was with us in the car; she had stood at the back of the room during the press conference, unnoticed and anonymous.

‘Poor Susie,’ she said at last, as we headed south. ‘I can’t imagine what this will do to her.’

I looked at her. ‘At a time like this,’ I told her, ‘a girl needs her father. Why don’t you tell that to old Joe Donn?’

We drove back up to Scotland next morning. I had to team up with the GWA — for a trip to Amsterdam. You wouldn’t believe the pop I got from those Dutch fans when I stepped up for my first announcement — and Prim wanted to spend the weekend with Susie.

Then on the following Monday, I was back at work on the movie. Miles did re-shoot the ending to make it more like our real-life adventure; we got into wetsuits again and filmed some scenes in a big tank. But Dawn and I were still the surprise bad guys, he still got zapped, and I still went to my fiery doom in the blazing chopper. All in a day’s work — or in this case, a week, for by Friday we were finished, and Snatch, subject to editing, special effects, and adding the music score, was a wrap.

‘What do you think?’ I asked Miles, as he drove me to Heathrow to catch the shuttle to Glasgow. ‘How’s the movie going to do? Will I ruin it?’

He chuckled. ‘Nothing and no one could ruin that now,’ he said. ‘You remember that half-point of yours.’

‘How could I forget it?’

‘Well, it’s a point now. I owe you; that was a big thing you did, backing me up on that rig. In money terms, you can start thinking two million dollars and work up from there. Just one thing, though. Take my advice and don’t say anything to that money-grabbing bastard of an agent of yours!’

He dropped me off at terminal one, and I rushed for the plane. In the lounge and en route for Glasgow, I must have signed thirty autographs. Was this what life was going to be like from now on, I wondered? If so, I decided, it might be time for a sharp exit.

As I stepped off the 757, and out into the grey, drizzly Glasgow night, where Prim was waiting for me, I found, to my total surprise, that I was whistling Bali Hai — a bloody sight more tunefully than Dylan ever did, I might add.

Life was quiet for a few weeks after that. Just as well, for Primavera Phillips and I had a wedding to plan, with one enforced change in the cast; I needed a new best man. I wasn’t sure what he would say when I asked him, but for the first time in over ten years, Miles Grayson agreed to accept a supporting role.

There was another change to the guest list too. We added Joe Donn. The old guy had taken Prim’s advice and told Susie, who was left as bereaved as any widow by Mike’s death, that he was her natural father, whatever the position was legally. She didn’t believe him at first, but finally, when he offered to take a DNA test to prove it, she accepted that he was telling the truth. Just as well, for apart from a hated aunt, her father’s sister, he was the only relative she had left in the world.

I stuck to my plan to spend the night before the wedding in a suite at Gleneagles. Miles and Dawn had elected to sleep at Semple House, but he and I arranged an impromptu stag night, in the very pub in which Stephen Donn had slipped his Mickey Finn into SuperDave’s Guinness. To our surprise, Dad Phillips insisted on joining us; to our even greater surprise, Elanore didn’t say a word.

Even although Mac the Dentist, who was stopping overnight at Gleneagles with Mary, Ellie and the boys, was there, it was a quiet do. Miles and Dave knew what their lives would be worth if I turned up for my wedding with a major hangover, so they made damn sure that I didn’t step over the line.

My Dad, on the other hand, was halfway to being rat-arsed when our taxi dropped the two of us back at the hotel. He got a bit sentimental when I tried to put him into the lift.

Instead of stepping inside, he grabbed my shoulder. ‘This has got to work this time, son,’ he slurred. ‘All your life you’ve been the luckiest bugger in the world, in every respect but one. But there’s nothing you deserve more than a happy marriage, ’cos you know what? Son or no son, you’re the best fucking man I know.’

I felt myself getting sentimental too, so I shoved him into the lift, pushed the button for his floor, then stepped out before the doors closed and walked up to my own.

I had been back in my suite for no more than five minutes when there was a soft knock at the door. I knew who it was even before I opened it.

‘Come on in, Noosh,’ I said to the slim figure in the corridor. ‘I wish I could say I was sorry about your brother, but I’m not. I saw him die, and he bloody deserved it.’

She took a small silver automatic from her handbag as she stepped inside. I’ve no doubt she’d have shot me there and then, had Mark Kravitz not moved up behind her and ripped it from her hand.

‘You don’t know my friend,’ I told her. ‘It’s time you did, though; he’s had you under observation for weeks.’ There was a sofa in the suite’s sitting room. I pushed her gently down on to it. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘I can guess the story, but let’s have it anyway.’

She looked up at me, and her narrow face took on the look of the purest hatred I have ever seen. ‘How did you know?’ she hissed.

‘Through your mother,’ I told her.

‘No one ever found out much about your brother; he was two people, Stephen Donn and Stu Queen, and he covered his tracks very well by moving from one personality to another. When he died, I thought at first that I’d never get to know why he held such a vicious grudge against me. As far as I could see the trail was as dead as him.

‘Then I thought of his mother; she was the only link with him I had left. So I asked someone, one of the spooks who was around in Amsterdam, if they could find out more about her. It didn’t take long at all. She’s a naturalised British subject, so she has a file at the Home Office.

‘That told me that she entered the UK in 1968, having escaped from Czechoslovakia a day or two before the Soviet invasion. In those days, her name was Mira Turkel, and she brought with her a five-year-old daughter, Anoushka.’

Her poisonous glare only made my smile wider. ‘Sometimes, I’m as thick as two short planks, you know, Noosh.’

‘Yes, I know,’ she said, in a voice so acid that it should have melted her teeth.

‘I should have smelled a rodent straight away up in Aberdeen, when you showed up in the Treetops, acting reasonably pally. But no, I’m loveable Oz, am I not? No one can stay mad at me for ever, so I fell for it, and I got you into that movie crowd scene next day. No wonder the Grampian police couldn’t find a bullet. There never was one, was there? Stephen fired a blank from the back of that bloody motorcycle.

‘If my brain had been working, I might have twigged it right then. A series of attacks on people close to me; okay, vicious, twisted, but with a mad logic to it. But why were you one of the targets? Who could have known about the connection between you and me, unless they had heard it from you?

‘You shouldn’t have involved yourself, Noosh. I was too dumb to work it out until it was too late, but it was a huge risk.’ To my complete surprise, I felt a gusher of rage blast up inside me. I had meant to play that final scene as Mr Cool; superior, dismissive, more in sorrow than in anger. But I wasn’t that good an actor, nor will I be, ever. I hated that woman as much as she hated me, and I could not keep it from showing.

‘You had to do it, though, hadn’t you. You’re better than the rest of us aren’t you, and you have to let us know it. It’s not enough for you to be in command of your own destiny, is it; you have to control other people, too. You’re good at it too. God, you fooled Jan for long enough.’