Poisoned Cherries

by Quintin Jardine

  She threw me a dazzling smile. “Good. Because there won’t be any more, you know. This one’s going to be a spoiled only-child.”

  “Susie …” I began.

  She could read my mind, almost as well as Jan was able. “Don’t go there, Oz. Don’t give me the “I’ll stand by you” speech. I’ve got everything planned out. I’ll run the business mostly from home; my managers and staff will have to get used to meeting me there. I’ll have a live-in nanny, and domestic help; someone to clean and someone to cater when I have working lunches and the like. I don’t need stood by, lover, especially not by someone like you. You’re just starry-eyed over being a dad, so don’t go noble on me.”

  That shut me up; in fact neither of us spoke, until the Charing Cross turn-off. “What are you going to do while you’re shooting this new movie?” Susie asked me.

  “You mean where am I going to live?”

  “Yes.”

  “I haven’t made my mind up. I could take a suite in a hotel, but I had enough of them in Toronto, so I’m going to look for a place to rent for the duration. I’m not due there until the middle of next week, though; that being the case I thought I might bunk with you till then, and use the time to get myself sorted out.” I looked at her in the mirror again. “Or is that not a runner?”

  She grinned at me. “I think I can allow that. The thought of sleeping with a movie star still has its attractions.”

  Eight.

  It was clear to me from the off that Susie loved that apartment. Even if she had been ready and willing, I saw that as a big obstacle to us getting together permanently, since I couldn’t conceive of myself wanting to lay down any roots there, not again.

  Still, our time together was fun, while it lasted, even if I found it difficult to concentrate on the script of the new movie. A new baby is a bit like a quiet fart, in that its presence pervades all the surrounding space. A few months before, wee Janet hadn’t been as much as a twitching in my loins, never mind a gleam in my eye. Prim and I had muttered things about children, but vaguely, quietly, as if we were each afraid the other might take us seriously.

  My Jan had been pregnant when she died; Prim had been pregnant too at one stage, by someone else, so each of us had our own mixed feelings, even if they were unexplored and unspoken.

  When Susie and I had flung our fling, I had made the classic male assumption that she was on the pill. It had been years since a knotted condom had lain under my bed. Yet when she let me in on the truth, I felt my heart take flight in my chest; if Prim had given me the same tidings, it would have fallen like a stone.

  I’d tried to explain my elation to myself, but I couldn’t. And then wee Jan was born and I understood. Things don’t have to be conventionally right; some just are. She was perfect, a doll, growing more beautiful by the day, as her face uncrumpled and her features began to define themselves. Both of her grandfathers came to visit, my Dad and Joe Donn, Susie’s natural father. Joe didn’t quite know what to make of me, but he made a fuss of the baby, that’s for sure.

  I watched her all the time. I watched Susie feed her, change her Pampers, dress her for the day, settle her down for the night. When she was asleep I couldn’t stop myself from slipping into the nursery and standing there, staring at her. I’d always thought of myself as a clever bastard; I’d just never realised how clever I was, until her mother and I made her.

  I was standing there, on the Wednesday after we’d brought her home, when I felt a small hand slip into mine. Susie stood beside me, looking down, just like me, her mouth hanging open in a smile as gauche as mine. Joe Donn had just headed back home to Mother well, and we were alone again with our child.

  “There won’t be anyone else, you know,” she whispered. “Remember all that stuff I spouted back at the turn of the year, about finding a titled twerp to give me a couple of kids and a place in the country that he could run with my money? That was all crap; I’ve got what I want.”

  “So now I can piss off, is that what you’re saying?”

  “No. What I’m saying is that you can walk through that door any time you like, and come back any time you like.”

  “Mmm. I don’t know if that’ll work both ways.”

  “I don’t care. As long as you provide accommodation suitable for Janet when she comes to stay with her dad, I don’t care. She’ll have a full-time nanny as of next week, and they’ll arrive as a package.”

  I hadn’t given any thought to that one. In fact I hadn’t given any thought to anything that might happen after the baby’s birth.

  “Christ,” I murmured, “I don’t even have accommodation suitable for me at the moment.”

  “You still own the Spanish villa, don’t you? She was made there, so where better for her to visit?”

  “I’m selling that to Scott Steele. He’s been renting it for a while, and he made me a good offer for it.”

  “What have you got in America?”

  “Nothing; the place where Prim and I lived was leased, and I’ve let it go. If I was asked what my permanent address is right now I’d have to say that I don’t have one. I don’t even have a car; I sold those to Scott as well.”

  Susie stifled a chuckle. “Oz Blackstone, millionaire vagrant; look, I mean it. You have to have something; I’m not having you take Janet to some crappy rented condo.”

  “Okay, let’s do some supposing. Suppose you fancied coming to visit Daddy with her, to play families for a couple of weeks? Where would you like it to be?”

  “Anywhere safe, where they speak English.”

  I gave her my arched eyebrows look. “What the fuck are you doing in Glasgow, in that case? It’s disqualified on both counts.”

  She dug her nails into the palm of my hand. Janet started to stir, and so we crept out of the nursery, as quietly as we had come in.

  “How about life?” I asked her, as she half-closed the door behind us. “I’ve seen all these places, but I’m still a Fifer at heart. My Dad’s house has been lying virtually empty since Ellie moved to St. Andrews; I could take that over.”

  She patted my chest. “Whatever makes you happy… as long as it’s good enough for our daughter.”

  “Nothing will ever be good enough for our daughter.”

  She squeezed my fairly impressive triceps. “God help the lads when they come calling, in that case.”

  “Indeed. It takes one to know one.”

  Susie grinned up at me, slipped her arm through mine and led me along the hall.

  “How’re you feeling now, by the way?” I asked her. “Still sore?”

  She stopped at the bedroom door. “Not so’s you’d notice.”

  Nine.

  I’d left the Edinburgh accommodation problem to Greg McPhillips. Life is ironic; he used to give me work, now he was getting so much from me that he’d almost become my personal assistant.

  He called me on Thursday morning with a proposition. “I know this chartered surveyor in Edinburgh,” he began. Everybody knows a chartered fucking surveyor in Edinburgh, there are so many of them, and especially in the city centre pubs, but Greg’s a boy for long preambles so I let him stroll on.

  The tale took a couple of twists before it settled down with a property developer who lived mostly off-shore but retained a duplex apartment on top of a building which he had refurbished in the Old Town, and which he was prepared to rent, fully furnished, of course, to the right clients, for the right amount of money.

  Greg hadn’t seen it himself, but his pal had assured him that the place was worth a look, so I drove back to the capital that afternoon, in Susie’s M3 once again, but giving it its head all the way this time… subject to normal speed limits of course, officer.

  The surveyor, a serious-looking, bespectacled guy named Luke Edgar, met me on the pavement at the Mound, about halfway between the Bank of Scotland head office and the temporary home of the Scottish Parliament. At first, I had no idea where we were going, but when he walked ten yards to an anonymous wooden front door I kn
ew right away.

  The building is probably the oldest surviving tenement in Edinburgh, and certainly the tallest. It wasn’t the CN Tower, as I looked up at it, but it went pretty high by Old Town standards. I knew the story; it had been bought and tastefully refurbished by the developer, a well known Edinburgh guy with a celebrated Midas touch, and a reputation as the best spotter of opportunities in the business.

  He had made a good job of the Mound, that’s for sure. The apartment towered over Princes Street, and looked panoramically across the city,

  west, north and east. I knew I was going to take it as soon as I walked through the door, although I made a show of haggling with earnest Edgar.

  There was a big reception room downstairs; I hit on that right away. We could use it for cast meetings, read-the roughs and even rehearsals. I took a look at the kitchen; everything was state of the art. There were two bedrooms off the living area and two more upstairs; a couple more than I needed, but there would be plenty of room for a makeshift nursery if I could persuade Susie to bring the baby through to see her dad at weekends. To cap it all off, there was a superb Bang and Olufsen sound system, with speakers wired into every room in the place.

  It didn’t take long to do the deal. Greg’s pal won the haggling hands down; he didn’t budge on his price and I caved in quick… what the hell, Miles was picking up the tab anyway. We shook hands on a three-month lease, with an option to extend on a month-by-month basis if shooting overran, and arranged that I would sign next day and move in whenever I liked.

  I was pretty chuffed as I drove back through to Glasgow. I knew that Susie would like the apartment, and I was pretty confident that we’d wind up playing house at weekends, for a while at least.

  Life, I thought, was indeed a bowl of bloody cherries, and great big red ones, at that.

  Ten.

  I persuaded Susie to help me move in on the Saturday, and to stay over, with the baby, for the weekend. She’s always been very much a Glaswegian, and therefore pretty dismissive of Edinburgh, but when she saw the place, even she was impressed.

  “You’ve got this thing about eyries, haven’t you,” she said, as she looked out across the Mound. “Your old flat in Edinburgh was a loft, then you bought the Glasgow place, which looks over everything, and the villa in Spain. I’ll bet you had a view in California as well. Right?”

  I thought of the crashing Pacific waves. “True,” I admitted. “It’s the way I was brought up.”

  “Rubbish,” she laughed. “It’s you, Blackstone. You’ve either got a voyeuristic streak, or it’s sheer paranoia… you’re afraid of the idea of anyone looking in on you.”

  I hadn’t thought about it before, but she’d a point. I’ve always liked high places. I broke my arm once falling out of a tree; not even that discouraged me.

  “I don’t think I’m a voyeur. As for being paranoid,” I said, as I thought about recent events, ‘if I am, it’s been justifiable a few times in my past. You know that well enough.”

  A cloud crossed her face, briefly; I guessed who might have been behind it. “Do you think about him much?” I asked her.

  She chewed her lip. “Mike? I think about him as infrequently as I can possibly manage… which is still quite a lot. I envy you, in one way; when you think about Jan, you think warm. I can’t do that. Funny, I don’t feel bitter about Jack Gantry, but I do about Michael Dylan.”

  “Then try not to; Mike was weak, but most of us are. He loved you.”

  “No he didn’t,” she snapped. “If he had he’d have stayed with me, and not got involved in all the stuff that got him killed. And when that happened, he was leaving me, remember.”

  I couldn’t argue with that one; I’d been there, and I knew she was right. “Did you love him?” I asked her.

  “I thought so at the time, but not now. I really don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone, not till last Saturday morning.”

  “Don’t let him put you off, Susie.”

  “Ah, but he has. I wouldn’t know where to begin loving a man. All I want is to feel safe.”

  “Do you feel safe with me?”

  “Most of the time. When we’re together I do. I like being with you, Oz, but I’ll never trust another man after Mike, and I sure as hell wouldn’t trust you. I know you too well. How many women have you slept with since last January?”

  “One.”

  She threw me a quick, guilty grin. “I’ve misjudged you, then; sorry.”

  “No, you haven’t. I never touched Prim after what happened in Spain; neither of us wanted to. She never forgot you and I never forgot Barcelona. There was someone else, though, someone in L’Escala, but it was complicated. It shouldn’t have happened, but it did. I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to apologise to me, remember? You’re a free man. Anyway, what’s complicated about nooky?”

  “In this case, the lady was married … to the guy Prim ran off with after she was tipped off about us.”

  “I see. You were all getting even, then.”

  “Vero might have been, but I wasn’t. You had shown me the real Oz Blackstone by that time; you’d taught me about myself. Completely devoid of conscience, remember.”

  Susie looked at me, indignantly. “Sounds as if I taught you too bloody well!” The look became a frown; she doesn’t do that too often. “But you’ve told me about her. Why?”

  “You asked.”

  She snorted. “And you told me, just like that! Do you think so little of me?”

  “Far from it; I should have told you before. It was a secret between us.”

  “Why didn’t you let it stay that way? Are you just trying to put me in my place?”

  I looked at her. I had come clean without thinking, but I knew why I had done it. “I told you because I didn’t want it there any more. It’s a part of my past that I’m not proud of, and I didn’t want it lying between us like a land mine I stepped up to her and put my hands on her waist. “You said you felt safe with me, Susie. I want you always to feel that way, and I promise you that you always will be.”

  Her eyes softened; so did her voice. “What does that mean?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know. Just that you and the baby are now the two most important people in my life, and it will stay that way. I love wee Janet with all my heart; she turns my insides to mush. And how could I love her without loving her mother as well?”

  She pressed her forehead against my chest and I held her to me. “Shut up, Blackstone,” she murmured. “Don’t complicate things.”

  “How am I doing that?”

  She looked up. “I’m afraid of you, man, don’t you understand that? I’m afraid that you’ll be another Dylan; he was a scheming, ambitious bastard, and so are you… well, ambitious, at least. Mike didn’t have the wit or the balls to achieve his ambitions, but you do. I’m afraid that if I commit myself to you, those ambitions… not to mention your heretofore extremely promiscuous dick… will lead you away from me, and I’ll get hurt again, only worse.”

  “You’re wrong about me there,” I protested. “I’ve never had a properly thought-out ambition in my life. Everything that’s happened to me has been by accident, until I’ve got where I am. I like doing what I’m doing now; I don’t plan to do anything else, until I go out of fashion. By then, I’ll have enough dough to enjoy a nice long retirement. Shit, I have now.

  “And as far as my… sorry… our pal down there’s concerned, he’s had a right few opportunities over the last few months, in Canada and in California, and he hasn’t risen to a single one.”

  She was smiling again; I was happy about that. “Are you telling me that from the time you went to the States at the end of January, until last Wednesday night, you were celibate?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “That beggars belief. Why?”

  “I wasn’t sure, until right now. Remember what you said the other night, about me being able to walk back through your door any time I like? Remember I said that might not cut
both ways? Well it does. I don’t want anyone but you.”

  One of those long silences sprang up between us, like a barrier, until Susie knocked it down.

  “Is that so? Well, do you remember when I said I didn’t care if you did or not? That wasn’t exactly true either. I care all right. You’re not going to make me say I love you, but I care.”

  She pushed me away and held me at arms’ length. “That doesn’t mean I trust you, mind. When the baby and I go back to Glasgow, you’ll be a boy-about-town again. It’ll be just like it was when you were here before. You’re on probation, Oz. I want to make damn sure you don’t revert to type, before I start believing any promises.” Her eyes narrowed. “You will be honest with me, yes?”

  Mine widened. “Totally.” I meant it.

  “I’ll believe that much, then. We tell each other everything. When you’re working here we spend as many weekends as we can together. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  “What happens when this picture’s finished?”

  “I’m going to Vancouver. You and Janet coming?”

  “We’ll see about that… if we get that far.”

  Eleven.

  I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure what we’d agreed when Susie took the baby back to Glasgow the following night, to be ready for the arrival of the nanny next day.

  I knew that whatever it was I liked the idea, and I felt more at peace than I had done since Jan had died. I knew also that I’d better get my head around Miles’s new movie, since there wasn’t that much time left.

  Obviously, I’d skimmed through the script before I’d taken the part. The story was fast-moving and exciting, with a slam-bang climax, set in some familiar locations in and around Edinburgh, and I decided to read the book to get myself under the skin of my character. The hero was a senior police detective called Bob Skinner, a real hard bastard; I was playing his sidekick, a guy around my own age by the name of Andy Martin.