Quintin Jardine - Wearing Purple

‘ I suppose so ,’ she had said. ‘ I’ve got the hairdresser in the morning, and I’m shopping in the afternoon, but I can always work in the evening, before your show. ’ I strained to remember what she had said after that, as I had strained to hear her words against the Spanish shouts all around me. ‘ I’m getting there, Oz. I’ll let you see what I’ve found when you get home. ’

Of course she hadn’t taken those papers back to The Gantry Group office. She’d been keeping them to show to me.

There could only be one answer to the riddle: someone had been watching the flat on Saturday morning, had seen her drive away, and had made an unnoticed entry to recover the files, which I knew would have been tidied away by then. Jan and I had a strict rule; we never allowed our jobs to mess up our home, outside working hours.

Of course, this led on to a further conclusion. Whoever broke into our flat would have had ample time to roll out the washing machine and fit a booby-trap device, just as the manufacturer’s ‘impartial’ experts had suggested.

And who, apart from me, knew that Jan was working on those papers, and about the thing which she had been anxious not to discuss across the dinner table under the ears of Detective Inspector Mike Dylan? Only Miss Susie Gantry, that’s all.

When I sat down and thought about the situation rationally, Susie Gantry made no sense at all as a suspect. She had hired Jan in the first place and had asked her to research the profitability of the business.

Unless of course my wife had been a far better accountant than she expected. What if, I asked myself, Susie had simply expected Jan to give the business a clean bill of health then pick up the reins from old Joseph Donn? What if Jan had stumbled on something that was buried really deep, something that she was never meant to find?

What if she had signed her own death warrant by dropping that hint to Susie across our dinner table?

‘No way, Oz!’ I said aloud, as Jan would have. ‘Trust your judgement on this. Susie Gantry is not the sort of person who sends people to break into houses and rig deadly devices. No fucking way!’

‘But someone did,’ I shot back at myself. ‘Even if the accident was just that, a fatal one in a million fault, someone took those papers and put them back in the Gantry files. Somewhere in the Gantry office there’s someone who didn’t want Jan to find whatever was hidden in those records.’

It was as if she was there with me; the other half of my brain, as she had become, slipping in points to the argument. ‘So why did that someone take the chance of putting those papers back into the files, having taken them, and the notes, from our place?’

‘Because if they knew that you were dead, Jan,’ I whispered, ‘there would be no threat. The Gantry Group is a private company, but the records of the business have to be kept for Inland Revenue purposes. There would have been an element of danger in simply throwing those files away. So whatever this deadly secret is, it must be there still, buried deep in the books, where only a clever girl like you could work it out.

‘But now that Mr Joseph Donn and his nephew are back in control of the company accounts, there won’t be any more clever girls looking them over, will there.’

I felt my eyes narrow as the cold anger which had overwhelmed me in Barcelona took hold of me once more.

‘Time to talk to the police, Osbert Blackstone,’ I said, in that voice of someone else’s. ‘Even though you’ll be putting the policeman in question right on the spot.’

I had arranged with Everett that I would meet him at midday on Monday to discuss how to protect the pay-per-view event, but before I left home, I called Greg McPhillips.

‘Hi Oz,’ he greeted me, affable as ever. ‘Have you had a chance to think rationally about taking action against the Germans? I’ll tell you now; you don’t need the money.

‘I’ve sorted out all Jan’s insurance policies: your mortgage, such as it was, is paid off automatically, there’s an additional endowment policy that pays eighty grand in the event of accidental death, a death in service arrangement as part of her pension plan, the fund value itself, and a straight life policy. There’s a lot of cash there — I’m not going to say how much over the phone — but the tax planning was done very well, so you should be exempt from estate duty.’

It went straight over my head. ‘You’re not going to give me back my wife though, are you, Greg?’

‘No, pal. That I can’t do.’

‘Well in that case you just sort everything out, pay all the funeral expenses, take your own fee, and put the balance in some sort of account. Tell me when it’s all done, ’cause right now, I don’t give a shit.

‘As for the Germans, I want another week to think about that. If I do take action against them, it won’t be about money, believe me.’

‘No, of course it won’t, Oz. I shouldn’t have said that.’

I couldn’t help but laugh at his contrition, since I’d heard it so often before. ‘Greg, my dear old friend, a list of all the things you shouldn’t have said would stretch from here to Edinburgh and back.’

I hung up and headed across the river to the GWA headquarters, where Everett was waiting for me with fresh coffee in the pot. I welcomed it; I was still cold with anger from the aftermath of my conversation with Susie, and was having trouble switching my attention to my client’s business.

He offered me a doughnut from a plate piled high before him. I took two, and left the rest for him.

‘I just checked with the networks; our advance booking figures for the pay-per-view have set a new record in Europe for any event. Counting the UK, Germany, Holland, Poland, Italy, France and Spain we have three and a half million buys.’

‘What’s that in cash?’ I asked him.

‘Seventy-two million dollars, my man, of which sum a shade over twenty-five million comes to the Global Wrestling Alliance.’

I stared at him; for all the weeks I had been working for Everett, I had no idea that his business could generate that sort of cash.

‘Taken together, the European market’s still not as big as America. Now you understand what Tony Reilly has to lose?’

For the first time, I did. ‘With that at stake,’ I said, ‘whatever it takes to protect this event, you do it.’

‘And what do you say that is, Mr Detective?’ he growled, guessing my answer in advance.

‘First, we tell the police what’s been happening. Either you agree to that or I’m out the door now. I’ve been playing hide and seek with the law on this assignment for long enough. I know a guy on the Serious Crimes Squad — Mike Dylan, Susie Gantry’s boyfriend. I’m seeing him tonight, and I want your authority to tell him what’s been happening.’

He looked at me doubtfully. ‘I mean it, Everett,’ I told him. ‘You let me tell Mike or you’re getting yourself a new announcer for Wednesday.’

He shrugged those great shoulders. ‘Fair enough,’ I said. I stood up, turned and walked to the door. I was in the act of turning the handle, when I heard him sigh behind me.

‘Yeah, okay,’ he conceded. ‘You can talk to him. But ask him to be discreet, please.’

‘Thanks. Of course I will.’ I went back to my seat, and picked up what was left of my first doughnut. ‘Next, I think you should hire a good security firm to do a complete check of the arena, before the spectators are admitted. I take it that you’ll have a full house?’

‘Hell yes! We sold out this one a month in advance. This Ingliston place ain’t the biggest arena, but it’ll look great on screen.’