Craig Russell - The Deep Dark Sleep

The receptionist ’phoned up to Macready’s suite and I was asked to wait until someone came down for me, so I cooled my heels in the hotel lobby. At least I was cooling them on expensive marble.

When I had telephoned from my office to arrange the meeting, I had spoken to a young woman with an American accent and enough frost in her voice to make the Ice Age seem balmy. She had been expecting my call, obviously having been prepped by Fraser.

I had just sunk up to my armpits in red leather and was reading a newspaper when I heard the same frosty tone. When I looked up I found myself in the full frigid glare of a Nordic goddess of about twenty-five … and thirty-six-twenty-four-thirty-four. Her pale blonde hair looked more natural than permed and the full, deep-red lipsticked lips accentuated the Prussian blue of her eyes. She was dressed in a grey business suit and white blouse and was all curve and legs so long I was surprised when they stopped at the ground. I found myself staring at her figure. She found me staring at it too and the frost in the pale blue eyes dropped a few degrees more.

‘Mr Lennox?’ she asked, with only slightly less distaste than if she had sunk a stiletto heel into dog droppings.

‘I’m Lennox,’ I said, and somehow resisted adding and I’m your slave forever .

‘I’m Leonora Bryson, Mr Macready’s assistant.’

‘Lucky Mr Macready …’ I smiled a smile a wolf would have thought uncouth and fought my way out of the red leather armchair.

‘Follow me, Mr Lennox,’ she said and turned on her heel.

She had made it sound like a command, but the truth was that following her could easily have become my second favourite pastime. She had a narrow waist which emphasized the swell of her thighs and ass. And I use swell in every sense of the word. I was disappointed when we reached the elevator and the lift man slid the concertina door open for us to enter. He was a stunted little Glaswegian with a drawn, dour face, but he held my gaze for a split second as Miss Bryson entered the lift. Oh, I know, pilgrim, I thought as we exchanged the look. I know .

When we got out, Leonora Bryson led me along a labyrinth of corridors lined with expensive wood panelling. I wasn’t worried about finding my way back: I would simply follow the trail of drool I was leaving behind. The doors to the rooms we passed were so widely spaced that you could tell that these were the hotel’s suites. Stopping at one of the doors, she swung open a hundred pounds of oak without knocking and we stepped into a room so big that just a Glasgow mile and a half away it would be expected to house three families. That was the thing about Glasgow that had always struck me most: not just that there was a huge chasm between rich and poor, which was something you found in just about every British city, but that Glasgow seemed to do it on a bigger, louder, cruder scale. Wealth here was un-Britishly ostentatious and brash as if trying to out-shout the deafening poverty all around it. I was no Red, but, despite old Uncle Clem’s very British post-war welfare revolution, sometimes the injustice of it all really got to me.

There were two goon-types in the sitting room of the suite: big sorts with loud suits and louder shirts and Marine-style crew-cuts. Obviously the security sent over by the studio. They looked as out of place in Glasgow as it was possible to look and I would have sworn I could see their Californian tans fading as I watched. A man who was easily as tall and broad as the goons stood up as we entered. In a quiet and friendly but authoritative tone, he asked the goons to leave us alone. My Nordic ice maiden led them out.

‘Mr Lennox?’ John Macready switched on the one hundred watt smile that had beamed from the publicity photograph. I shook his hand. ‘Please sit down. Can I get you a drink?’

I said a Scotch would be fine but a Bourbon would be better.

‘I didn’t know you were an American, Mr Lennox.’

‘I’m not. I’m Canadian. It’s just that I prefer rye.’

He handed me a wrist-straining hunk of crystal filled with ice and whiskey.

‘Canadian? I see … I couldn’t quite place your accent.’ Macready sat down opposite me. He had been meticulously tanned, tailored, groomed and manicured to the point of artificiality; an unreality compounded by the fact that he was preposterously handsome. He turned down the wattage of his smile. ‘I know you’ve been hired by Mr Fraser. I take it he has told you everything.’

‘He’s told me all I need to know about the blackmail, if that’s what you mean, Mr Macready.’

‘And the photographs? He showed you those?’

‘I’m afraid he had to.’

Macready held me in a frank gaze with no hint of embarrassment. ‘I take it you know what it could mean for my career if these photographs were to be made public?’

‘The very nature of the photographs means that they can’t be made public. Any newspaper or magazine that printed them, even with strategically placed black bars, would be prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act. But that isn’t the danger. A newspaper can print that they are in possession of the photographs and describe their contents in broad terms. It then falls on you to deny the allegations, which you can’t, because — although they are unpublishable — they are fully admissible in court as evidence in a libel trial. And, it has to be said, in a criminal prosecution, too. You are aware that the acts depicted are illegal under Scots law.’

‘Under American law as well, Mr Lennox.’

‘Yes, but the Scots have an enthusiasm for prosecuting these kind of cases. Presbyterian zeal.’

‘Trust me, I know all about that, Mr Lennox. Macready isn’t a stage name: I’m of Scottish descent. My father and grandfather were both elders of the Presbyterian church in West Virginia.’

‘Does your father know about …?’ I groped around for an appropriate noun, but it remained out of my grasp, somewhere between inclination and problem . Macready picked up on my discomfort and gave a small, bitter laugh.

‘My father has never discussed it with me, nor I with him, but I know he knows. Despite my war record, my acting achievements and the wealth I’ve accumulated, all I see in my father’s eyes when he looks at me is disappointment. And shame. And, as you’ve pointed out, Mr Lennox, my sexual preferences make me a criminal, for some reason. But let me make this absolutely clear to you: I am not in the slightest ashamed of who and what I am. It is my nature, not a criminal trait or sexual perversion. I wasn’t turned into what I am because someone fiddled with me as a kid, and it’s not because I suffer from an unbounded libido that one gender cannot contain. Incidentally, that last description applies to one of your own swashbuckling heroes.’

‘But the studio …’

‘The studio knows about it. Has done for years. They fret about it all right, but that’s got nothing to do with some skewed sense of sexual morality. All they care about is the impact it would have at the box office. On the bottom line. Trust me, Hollywood has a much more liberal view of the world than Fayette County, West Virginia … or Scotland. The fact that I am homosexual is an open secret in Hollywood circles, Mr Lennox. But it is kept well out of view of the queue outside the movie theatres in Poughkeepsie or Pottsville or Peoria. What and who you see on the screen as John Macready is a falsehood … but it is a falsehood that moviegoers have to believe in.’

I thought about what Macready had said.

‘I’m not here to judge you, Mr Macready. Frankly, I don’t care what anyone gets up to behind closed doors so long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. And I agree that there are far better ways for the police to occupy their time. But you are a Hollywood star and the other party is the son of one of Scotland’s most prominent aristocrats. This is a serious situation.’