Quintin Jardine: Screen Savers

He moved towards her. It was dark, but there was no disguising the menace in his eyes.

She stood there framed in the open window, looking down at the incalculable drop to the sea below her, listening to the roar of the water as it pounded and frothed on jagged rocks. I wanted to help her, to leap on his sleek Hispanic back, to slap on a sleeper hold like my wrestler pal Liam Matthews, or simply to spin him round and give him an old-fashioned toeing. All my instincts told me to help. . she was Prim’s sister, for Christ’s sake. . but of course I couldn’t. I just sat there, a poor helpless fool, staring at murder about to happen.

Useless, Oz Blackstone, just plain useless.

She sensed him, the lithe Latino, at the last minute; she turned, her eyes widening in sheer terror as she saw him and realised in the same instant, exactly what he had in mind. I expected her to scream, but she didn’t. No, as quickly as the fear had flashed across her face, inexplicably it was gone, replaced by a soft mocking smile.

‘Just for a second. .’ she said softly.

And there he was, behind the intruder, muscles tensed in his white T-shirt, his long hair flying as he did what I had wanted to do. In a single blur of powerful movement, he kicked the man behind the knee, without warning, sending him spinning, then caught his right wrist and twisted his arm savagely up behind his back.

My eyes must have been standing out like organ stops as I watched, an intruder myself in the darkness. For long seconds, the three figures stood in a frozen tableau, Dawn still smiling, the short struggle between the two men concluded.

And then she stepped aside, away from the open window. Now her rescuer was grinning, his impossibly good looks turned suddenly into something evil. With hardly any visible effort he raised his captive up on his toes and hurled him outwards, over the low sill, into the night. The doomed man’s arms flailed wildly as he screamed his way down to the rocks below.

Dawn laughed; a soft, deep, throaty chuckle. I felt a shiver run through me; in that instant she sounded just like Jan. But when she spoke, the accent was different. ‘You bastard,’ she murmured, as she wound her arms around his neck. ‘Just for a moment, I thought you were going to let him-’

He put his hands on her waist, lifted her and threw her backwards, out of the window. It happened so fast that the smile stayed on her face, even as she started on her way down to death.

In the darkness I heard a voice cry out: ‘Jesus Christ!’ I realised that it was mine.

Miles Grayson laughed as he pushed the remote button. ‘Now that, Oz, is the sort of audience reaction any movie director likes to hear,’ he said, as his face froze on the big television screen.

Beside me, I could hear Primavera, breathing hard. I pushed myself up from the floor and snapped on a table lamp, then pulled back the heavy, drawn curtains, letting the Glasgow summer evening back into my living room.

‘What d’you think?’ Miles asked. You two are the first to have seen that, apart from us, the crew, and the technician who helped me edit the final cut.’

‘I thought you were supposed to be the good guy,’ said Prim.

‘That’s the hook,’ Dawn answered, in her own accent this time. ‘Miles is always the good guy, so we figured that when he chucks me out of the window all of a sudden it’ll just blow everyone away.’

‘Is that the finish?’

A few years ago, Time magazine had a poll to choose the most famous human on the planet. The fourth most famous looked up at me from my heavy leather sofa. ‘It is at the moment,’ he replied in his Aussie-Californian drawl. ‘Did you get it?’

I was long past being awed by Miles. All that fame crap aside, he was just my partner’s brother-in-law, and just another Equity member, like me. I did a pretty good job of looking down my nose at him; not difficult, since I’m three inches taller than him, when we’re standing side by side.

‘Do’s a favour, of course I got it. Classic sub-Hitchcockesque melodrama; you’re the soft-centred, romantic, perennial failure type back from the South Seas and shagging your incredibly rich brother’s wife. She sells you this scheme where the pair of you do him in and inherit the family millions. . except, right at the end she finds out the hard way that you don’t plan to share the inheritance.

‘Nice one. Kept me right on the edge of my floorboard all the way through. No kidding.’

‘Yes,’ Prim chipped in. ‘Biased or not, it’s the best film I’ve seen this year. Mind you, it was a bit strange watching you two on screen with you sitting behind me all the time.’

‘Did you understand the ending?’ her sister asked.

‘I think so. You can’t help it, when Miles’ face suddenly takes on that look.’

The world’s fourth most famous human looked at his wife, eyebrows raised. She smiled, and nodded her head.

‘Great,’ he said. ‘Thanks, you two. You’ve just saved us a few hundred thousand dollars. I was thinking about shooting a few extra scenes, just to bring out the final twist in the tail. But we’ll treat you as a test audience and go with what we’ve got.’

‘Maybe you can do a sequel,’ Prim suggested. ‘Maybe Dawn could have a sister who doesn’t believe that she and her husband died accidentally, and turns up to investigate her death.’

Miles grinned. ‘You fancy the part?’

‘Not me. Better make it an identical twin sister. Maybe you could find a part for Oz, though. He is a member of your profession, after all.’

Miles and Dawn stared up at me. The looks of astonishment which swept over their faces were as dramatically effective as anything we had seen in their movie.

‘You? An Equity member? You’ve never done a day’s acting in your life.’

‘Maybe not, but this is a letter from Equity and it is offering me full membership.’

She looked over her shoulder, with that half-smile, half-frown that only she could pull off, the one that told me when I was being a plonker. She had kept her fair hair long, the way it had gone during her sojourn in Spain. Prim and I don’t go back all that far in terms of years, but in terms of shared experiences there was a bond between us tied in stainless steel wire.

Primavera Phillips is the daughter of two genuine eccentrics, whereas my mother, at least, was a normal, feet on the ground sort of woman, even although my Dad is. . well, he’s my Dad. With that sort of genetic inheritance you might have thought I’d only be half as daft as Prim.

Her special sort of daring daftness must be infectious, though, for ever since I met her my life has been stood on its head, and I’ve found myself in situations that were about as likely. . and as hazardous to the health. . as Jimmy Hill walking into the Horseshoe Bar in his England bow tie and asking for a pint of bitter.

All I ever wanted was a nice quiet life as an ordinary, self-employed Private Enquiry Agent, taking enough depositions for lawyers and insurers to keep myself in the modest style to which I’d become accustomed. . or maybe I should say, in which I’d become complacent.

Not even in my sweatiest nightmare had I ever wanted to become the sort of private detective you read about in mass market novels, or see on telly. Then, one ordinary day, I walked into a flat just off Leith Walk, and came face to face with two bodies. One was dead. The other was very much alive; it was Prim’s.

My life changed beyond redemption in that instant. For a start, thanks to Prim’s even dafter sister Dawn, she and I found ourselves in mortal danger, from which we escaped only by the skin of our teeth. . albeit with a big bag of money.