Quintin Jardine - Wearing Purple

And then she stepped into shot; the sort of woman who could start a fight in a seminary, just by being there. She had a tiara set in her lustrous auburn hair, and wore, technically, a tight-fitting sequinned evening number, with gleaming, coffee-coloured skin showing through a laced-up side panel which precluded any slight possibility that she might have been wearing underwear. On the day that bosoms were handed out, she had been at the head of the queue.

‘Oh yes, monster,’ she said, in a voice so sexy that it could have made a diabetic eat a cream egg omelette. ‘That’s right. We know what Daze’s weakness is, don’t we. You’re looking at her.’ As the camera zoomed in on her she flicked her red tongue along her top lip.

The screen went dead, but Everett kept on staring at it. ‘She ain’t kidding, boy,’ he whispered. For a moment I thought that he had forgotten I was there. I coughed, just to remind him. ‘Yeah,’ he said, still softly. ‘Let’s go. The action’s next door.’

We went back into the corridor and walked on until we reached the third door on the right. ‘All men are different,’ my dad told me once, ‘yet in some respects they’re all the same.’ That piece of Mac the Dentist wisdom came back to me as my huge guide opened the door. When you’ve smelled one ripe gymnasium, in principle you’ve smelled them all. It’s only the intensity that’s different.

I looked around; it must have covered at least a quarter of the total floor area of the unit. An impressive array of exercise machinery lined the far wall, while nearer to where we stood, there was a row of heavyweight static cycles, and two treadmills. Off to our right two punch-bags and two speed-balls hung from steel supports. Half of the equipment was in use; I glanced around and counted a dozen people. Four were smaller than the rest; it took me a couple of seconds to realise that they were women. In the centre of it all there was a practice ring; its canvas floor was about five feet high, and the area all around was covered in matting. Inside the three ropes, two men were circling each other, threateningly.

‘This is the work-room,’ said Everett. ‘This is where the boys train, and the girls too. The GWA is a team operation, and that’s how we train, like a football squad. . only harder.’ He nodded towards the ring. ‘Those two guys are in our headline match in the Newcastle Arena on Saturday. The big guy is Darius Hencke: ring name the Black Angel of Death. He’s German. The small fellow is Liam Matthews, from Dublin: real name and ring name. His ring persona is a cocky little bastard. He’s pretty much like that in real life too.

‘They’re choreographing their fight. It’s for The Transcontinental Title, our secondary championship belt. Come on over and meet them.’

As we walked towards the ring, Matthews hurled a flying karate kick at the Angel of Death, who caught him in mid-air, lifted him above his head, and threw him out of the ring over the top rope, sending him crashing down on to his back from a height of at least ten feet. The smack as he hit the rubber mat echoed around the gym, but no one took the slightest bit of notice: except me. I winced, expecting the paramedics to appear automatically, but the Irishman simply picked himself up. ‘I can take higher than that, Darius,’ he called up to the Angel. ‘As high as you can fuckin’ throw me, I can take.’

‘How about as high as I can throw you?’ Everett’s voice was hard all of a sudden. I had never heard Daze speak before.

Matthews grinned. ‘You got to catch me first.’

‘That time will come, my man.’

Then he was the bloke in the suit again, the fellow who had visited me up in our tower. ‘Liam, Darius,’ he said, nodding down at me. ‘This is Oz Blackstone. I’m thinking about giving him a try-out as our new ring announcer.’ As the two wrestlers glanced at me, I hoped that I had managed to keep my astonishment from showing.

Darius Hencke stepped clean over the top rope, and jumped down on to the gymnasium floor. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said, with a thick accent. He must have been at least six feet ten, a grim, glowering figure. Dark, I thought, for a German; but then he smiled, and all at once he didn’t look like Death at all. Liam Matthews said nothing, he simply threw me the briefest of grins. He wasn’t much taller than me, just over six feet, but in terms of muscular development he looked like a scaled-down version of Everett. He kept bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet; clearly, this was the sort of guy who was incapable of standing still. He seemed to radiate energy in waves.

‘Darius and Liam are two of our top attractions, Oz,’ Everett went on. ‘We’re a European organisation so it’s important that our squad is largely European too. Jerry, Diane, Barbara, Max and I are all Americans, and we have five others, including two of the women specialists, but other than that it’s an EU operation. It has to be anyway, or we’d have work permit problems.’

He turned to the wrestlers. ‘How you guys doing?’

‘We getting there,’ said Darius. ‘You just saw the start of the climax. While Liam is on the ground, I climb on top of the ring-post and dive at him, but Dee Dee pulls over a crowd barrier and I land on that.’

Everett frowned. ‘You sure you can do that? Even with one of the special aluminum barriers?’

The Angel nodded. ‘Sure. The centre section will geev a little under my weight to cushion my fall, but it will still protect Liam.’

‘Who’s Dee Dee?’ I asked lamely.

‘Dee Dee Rocca,’ Everett answered, ‘Liam’s ringside manager. Used to be mine too. Their job is to run interference with referees and opponents.’

He looked back at Darius. ‘And that’s end of match?’

‘Yes, the referee disqualifies Liam, so he keeps the belt. The transmission fades with me on the barrier, him underneath and the medics rushing in.’

The big man grinned. ‘Okay, you sold me. But rehearse it as often as you can. How many of those aluminum barriers do we have in stock?’

‘Half a dozen,’ said Liam, ‘I checked.’

‘Use at least three in rehearsal,’ Everett ordered. ‘But Liam, you don’t go underneath till we see how the first one reacts to the hit from Darius. Understood?’

The Irishman grinned, dismissively. ‘Sure, boss.’

The black giant nodded, and beckoned me to follow. ‘Those two guys are just about the best in the business,’ he said quietly, as we moved towards the door. ‘They got all the wrestling skills, and they’re unbelievable athletes too. Darius is as good a professional as you’ll meet in any sport. But Liam’s brashness, that I don’t like. This is a dangerous business, and a casual approach can cause accidents.’ He smiled, purposefully. ‘Some day soon,’ he muttered, in his Daze voice again, ‘the kid’s going to have a match with me. It’ll do him good.’ Somehow, I doubted that.

Everett led me out of the gym, down the corridor, and into his office. The room was carpeted, and the walls were wood-panelled, yet the feel was functional, rather than opulent. Clearly some of the furniture had been made with his size in mind, but the rest looked pretty ordinary. There were no ornaments in the room, and just a single photograph on the wall to the left. It showed a smiling, middle-aged black woman.

I pointed at it. ‘My mamma,’ Everett responded. ‘She’s been dead for a few years.’

The view from his window, facing the glass-topped table which served as his desk, was the blank grey wall of the unit opposite. Unexpectedly, part of me was inordinately pleased that there was one area in which I was one up on Daze. Jan and I had bought a big partners’ desk which we shared for our respective businesses. We had positioned it against the wall of our living area, between two windows, so that each of us, if we chose, would have a view of Glasgow to distract us.