Quintin Jardine - Wearing Purple

We left them to their discussion and went outside, into the night. The drizzle had turned into steady rain, but there was a string of taxis across the street.

‘Have you really got work tonight?’ I asked my wife, half an hour later, as I laid the big square boxes holding our takeaway pizzas on the kitchen counter.

I knew the smile she threw at me. I’d known it since we were sixteen years old. She nodded towards our supper. ‘D’you want that now, or reheated in an hour or so?’

I’ve always liked the word ‘rhetorical’: I was taught the full extent of its meaning by Mrs Janet Blackstone, nee More.

The master bedroom of our apartment is directly above the living space, with the same original windows, reaching down to the floor. All of our curtains were included in the sale price, but those in the bedroom had hardly ever been drawn. It looks out west and south over Glasgow, but its height makes it secluded, so Jan and I very quickly formed the habit of leaving the lights off and the windows uncovered.

We had forgotten all about the pizzas as we lay in bed an hour later, as happy and content as we had ever been in our lives, propped up on pillows, looking out at the traffic flowing across the Kingston Bridge, and at the headlight beams, distorted by the rain on the glass. ‘Dylan isn’t really as bad as all that, you know,’ she murmured, suddenly. Her brown hair had fallen over one eye, as she reached over and traced her index finger down my chest, pausing to flick blue lint from my belly-button. ‘He’s made Detective Inspector, after all.’

I picked up the blob which her probing finger had freed and looked at it. Did you ever wonder why belly-button fluff is always blue? I held it up. ‘He’s got about as much substance as that, my darling.’ I paused as an image formed in my mind. ‘Do you remember Slimey Carmichael?’

She laughed. ‘What, the Head Boy when we were in our fourth year at High School?’

‘That’s right. Since you do, you’ll remember as well that he owed his position to being the biggest brown-tongue in the school. He was a complete tosser at games and in class, but he smarmed up to all the senior teachers, and joined all the right school clubs and societies, so they bought his act.’

‘Don’t knock it, my love.You can get to be Prime Minister that way.’

‘Aye, maybe so. Anyway, Mike’s a bit like him. The first time I met him I thought he was a real high flyer, until I realised it was all hot air. His balloon’s been a bit deflated since then; some of Ricky Ross’s mud splashed on him. I suppose this Glasgow transfer’s a form of rehabilitation.

‘Still,’ I conceded. ‘As you say, when you get to know him he’s not so bad.’

‘Susie thinks so, obviously.’

‘True. She’s a lively wee thing, isn’t she.’

Jan nodded, as she slid down from her pile of pillows, fitting herself alongside me. ‘I wonder what her problem is?’ she mused.

‘Who says she’s got one?’ I slid down beside her.

‘She has, believe me. People don’t change their accountants otherwise.’

‘Forget her problem,’ I murmured, turning her towards me and nuzzling her firm breasts. ‘Let’s concentrate on our own.’

‘And what’s that?’ she asked, smokily, being rhetorical again. I answered her anyway.

‘When the hell are we going to eat those pizzas?’

In a lot of ways, Newcastle is like Glasgow. There’s nothing quaint about it, but it has the same sort of grit — evolved, I suppose, through a century of building big ocean-going vessels. Like Glasgow too, the distinctive character and toughness of its people still shines through, for all its nineties face-lift.

Jan and I travelled down from Scotland by train on Friday afternoon, first class of course, courtesy of Everett Davis. He and his star performers had gone down to Tyneside that morning, to do television promotions for the live event, while the road crew drove down in their trucks, to begin the setting up of the arena.

As the express cut silently through the fields of East Lothian, many of them ploughed already in readiness for their spring seeding, I asked Jan whether she had taken up Susie Gantry’s invitation.

‘I called her this morning, while you were out doing that interview,’ she replied. ‘We had a long chat.’

‘Why’s she looking for a new accountant then?’

‘Because she does have a problem. I was right. She thinks her book-keeper may be on the fiddle, and she wants someone independent to cast an eye over his work.’

That sounded a bit odd to me. ‘Wouldn’t the company’s auditors do that?’ I asked her.

‘Normally they would. But Susie buys her book-keeping and audit services from the same firm. They’ve just finished the audit for the last financial year, but they seem to have skated over some discrepancies that were worrying her.

‘As a result, she doesn’t trust any of them any more; she wants me to do some forensic work, either to confirm her suspicions or put her mind at rest.’

‘Has she spoken to her father about this?’

‘No. That’s a bit of a touchy point with her. When the Lord Provost gave her control of the firm three years ago, he saddled her with an in-house accountant. He was an old mate of Councillor Gantry, who’d been doing the job for years, but very badly, according to Susie. She tolerated him for as long as she could, but finally a few weeks back, she’d had enough. She fired him.

‘Her father wasn’t very pleased about his pal getting the sack, although he didn’t interfere. Against that background, though, the last thing Susie wants is for her appointees to be found wanting. She says her dad would never let her live it down. So, among other things, she wants help to find the right successor to his old mate.’

‘Are you going to do it?’

Jan nodded. ‘I’m having lunch with her in the Rotunda on Monday. We’ll sort out the brief then.’

She glanced out of the window, as the train swept past a huge, grey, monolithic, menacing building, which I guessed had to be Torness Power Station. ‘That’s next week, though,’ she said. ‘What’s the programme for this weekend?’

‘We check into the Holiday Inn, then I have to go to the Arena. Everett’s called a team meeting for five o’clock, to go through the running order for tomorrow’s show. The roadies will start to build the ring and dress the hall this evening, while the rest of us are having a buffet supper back at the hotel.’

She threw me a mock grimace. ‘You mean I have to eat with a bunch of sweaty wrestlers?’

‘They only sweat after their matches, my darling. Some of them even know how to use a knife and fork.You’ll enjoy it.’

‘If I must,’ she grinned. ‘What about tomorrow?’

‘That’s when you go to the Metro Centre. I have to be around the Arena most of the day, ostensibly rehearsing, but in practice nosing around and keeping my eyes open for potential saboteurs.

‘The show begins at six o’clock. I told Dad you’d meet him and the boys outside the main entrance at five thirty. Once the thing’s all over, and they’re heading back to Fife, we’re on our own. .’ I hesitated ‘. . Except that Everett’s invited us to have dinner with him and Diane.’

My wife grinned at me, and leaned across the table which divided our seats. ‘You know, Osbert,’ she whispered. ‘I think you’re as big a Daze fan as Mike Dylan. Just as well I sort of fancy him myself.’

We checked into the Copthorne Hotel, near to the station, to find that Everett’s secretary had booked us into one of the best rooms in the place, overlooking the River Tyne and its iron bridge, a smaller version of the Sydney Harbour landmark, but one which, I’ll bet, has seen as much action in its time.