Quintin Jardine - Wearing Purple

‘That’s good. Third, every piece of equipment that’s going to be used on Wednesday has to be checked personally by you. No more lethal turn-buckle pads, please.’

He shook his head. ‘No, that I guarantee. I’ll go over everything with Alex Kruger, the special effects controller.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘You never seen him? He works for our television contractor; it’s his job to make sure all the whiz-bangs go off exactly on time. Our road crew install them, he fires them with remote devices.’

I frowned at him. ‘Are you sure he’s okay?’

‘Yeah, no doubt about it. He couldn’t possibly have had access to the barrier that hurt Liam, or to the turn-buckle pad. Don’t worry about him.’

‘Listen mate,’ I told him, ‘until this show’s over on Wednesday, you should worry about everyone.’

The Horseshoe Bar is one of the last great unreconstructed pubs in Glasgow; not a plastic saloon with a list of designer beers and no draught worth the name, not a surplus-to-requirements banking hall staffed by smart young people in suits. No, the Horseshoe is a genuine, well maintained boozer with a polished wooden bar-top, a ripping good pint of lager and the best pie, beans and chips in town.

Dylan was there before me; ten minutes before me, he complained, but I had seen him stepping through the door as I turned the corner out of Renfield Street. No matter; since he was there first I let him buy the first round.

It being early on a Monday evening, the place was nothing like busy, but I took my lager nonetheless and motioned Mike to follow me to a table in a quiet corner near the door. ‘You changed your habits?’ he said. ‘I thought you were a stand-at-the-bar type.’

‘So I am,’ I told him. ‘But I want to talk to you, professional-like, and I don’t want anyone ear-holing us.’

He looked at me, suddenly suspicious. ‘Professionally? I can’t talk to you about my job, Oz. You know that.’

‘No, Michael,’ I said patiently. ‘I talk, you listen. Got it?’ Mollified, he nodded.

‘Good. What I have to say to you is on behalf of my client Everett Davis. I’ve been working for him undercover for the last few weeks. That’s what the ring announcer stuff has been all about.’

Dylan stared at me, in a mixture of mock amazement and outrage. ‘Have you been playing coppers again?’ he asked. It was surprisingly near the mark for him. A few weeks before I would have joked along with him, but I didn’t have the patience any more.

‘Don’t be fucking stupid, man,’ I snapped at him. ‘I’ve been working on a confidential basis, trying to determine whether certain suspicions which Everett had were justified. There’s no longer any doubt that they are, and so, acting on my advice, my client has now agreed that I should tell you, as a member of the Serious Crimes Squad, what’s been going on.’

I paused. ‘That’s how your report will begin, right?’ He smiled gently and nodded.

‘Okay, here’s the position. Everett is convinced that an American rival,Tony Reilly, of an organisation called Championship Wrestling Incorporated, has suborned someone in his employ to sabotage GWA shows and ruin his relationship with the television networks which are his customers.

‘There have been four incidents in all; two of them deliberate acts beyond doubt.’ I described the incidents in detail, from the rigged tape cassettes to Jerry Gradi’s near-fatal shooting in the ring in Barcelona, leaving nothing out, not even Prim’s sudden life-saving appearance.

All the flippancy had gone from my friend by the time I had finished. ‘Didn’t the Spanish police react?’ he asked.

‘I thought they would, but the ambulance crew told the surgeons that it was a wrestling injury. No one thought to take it further.’

‘It’s been a few weeks since then, though. Big Daze has been a bit backward in coming forward — and so have you, mate.’

I shot him a look that would have cut steel. ‘Sorry, Oz,’ he said at once. ‘You’ve had other things on your mind.’

‘Of which more later,’ I grunted. ‘Everett is very sensitive about this. His business is high-risk, but it generates millions of whatever currency you’d like to name, and billions of some of them. For a while we thought we were going to be able to hand you the whole thing on a plate.

‘I was in the States last week checking out our prime suspect, but we were wrong. It wasn’t him.’ I told him about Sonny Leonard and my trip to St Louis. ‘The guy is off the list, Mike. It just wasn’t him.

‘Which means,’ I concluded, ‘that we’re scratching around for a culprit. Everett’s convinced that it’s an American.’

‘And you?’ asked Dylan, ‘What do you think?’

‘It’s not me, that I can tell you. And it’s not Everett, or Jerry Gradi, or Liam Matthews — or Sally Crockett. Other than that, to be honest, I haven’t a clue. The only things I do know are that we’ve got a fully live event coming up on Wednesday evening and that the person behind these four incidents is still out there.’

The detective nodded. ‘Yes, and we also know that he’s got some skill with firearms, as well as access to a nasty wee piece of hardware. There are far more of these mini-pistols in circulation than you’ll ever hear us admit.’

He looked at me, suddenly sharper and more serious than I had ever seen him. ‘What does Everett want from us, Oz?’

‘The ball’s in your court,’ I told him. ‘I’ve told you about the situation; you’re the copper.’

‘Okay,’ said Dylan. ‘Suppose I go in tomorrow and tell my boss all about this. Has it occurred to you that there’s a possibility that he might have the Wednesday event called off?’

‘No it hasn’t. Why would he do that?’

‘Threat to public safety.’

‘But there hasn’t been a threat to the public.’

‘Jesus, you’ve had a guy shot in the ring. That sounds threatening enough to me.’

‘Mike, they have sold seventy million dollars’ worth of pay-per-view subscriptions so far. If this show is called off Everett is a dead man with the television networks, and GWA is bust. Whoever’s been out to get him, that person will have won, thanks to you. Do you want to explain that to Everett’s pal, Lord Provost Gantry — or his daughter?’

He gulped; a quick swallow of air. ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Maybe not.’

I seized an advantage. ‘Look, we’re hiring extra security for Wednesday, specifically to protect the public. You tell your boss, of course, and have a presence there, but don’t let him or anyone else dream of calling the thing off.

‘Try this one on. If I gave you details of everyone on the GWA payroll, could you feed them into the police national computer and see what it tells you?’

Dylan nodded. ‘Name, date and place or country of birth, National Insurance number, passport numbers for the foreigners: give me that sort of stuff and I should be able to come up with something.’

‘Now we’re talking. I’ll speak to Everett and get as much as we have to you as soon as possible.’

I finished my lager, walked over to the bar and ordered another round. Mike was grinning when I got back to the table. ‘I knew you were up to something with the big man. Ring announcer, my arse.’

I decided to wipe the smile off his face. ‘Since you’re the great detective, Michael,’ I said, ‘try this one on.

‘The night before she died, my wife was working on papers from the files of The Gantry Group; health care division. I know this because she told me when I phoned her from Barcelona. It was the last thing she ever told me in fact.’ I watched his face, saw my voice slice into him.