There wasn’t much moon but a little light was creeping in from the outside, through the slatted blinds. I could see … and feel… that my attacker was naked, and at the same moment I could feel… and just about see … that she was female. She was straddling me, trapping my upper arms with her feet, pressing my thighs to the ground with strong arms.
My eyes grew more accustomed to the light; I couldn’t believe what they were seeing, close up. Then I felt something else, and I heard a voice that was more of a loud mumble. “Lie still,” Mandy O’Farrell ordered, ‘or I may bite.”
I flexed my biceps and used my leg strength to lift her clear of the ground and to pull the part of her that was nearest to me even closer still. “I could say the same to you,” I pointed out. In the end, we called it a draw.
The apartment was warm; we were both covered in sweat from our brief struggle when she rolled off me, and swung herself round. She was grinning. “Think you’re so tough, eh?” She was right; half an hour before I had been thinking about filling in my stalker.
“Do you realise’, I asked her, ‘that I could have you fired?”
She gave me a look of pure innocence. “But Mr. Ross,” she exclaimed in a girlie voice unlike her own, “I was only obeying your orders.”
I stared at her in what must have been amazement, for she laughed out loud. “Ricky told me that you were heading back to Edinburgh on your own, and that I was to get here and stay as close to you as I could. Couldn’t do better than that, eh?”
“So how did you get in?”
“I told you, this building has no security… well, actually, it has but I’m rather good at that sort of thing. I’m good at all sorts of things, as you know by now.”
I have to move out of here, I thought. It’s bad luck; I keep getting beaten up by women.
I could feel an incipient carpet burn on my bum, so I pushed myself up from the ground and slid into the king-size-plus bed. Mandy followed me under the duvet. In the circumstances I couldn’t be bothered protesting. I caught another flash of her in the moonlight, as she stood. With her long powerful limbs, high breasts, and genuine blonde hair, she made me think of a silver wolf.
“Is this the way you usually go about your job?” I asked her.
“Not very often; in fact, hardly ever. Sometimes clients expect it; they think it’s part of the service. Those ones really have no chance. You’d think Arabs might be the worst for that, by the way, but they’re not. No, it’s the Americans you have to watch out for.”
“I’d have thought they’d have to watch out for you.” She laughed. “Those who tried it on, that is.”
She ran a hand across my chest. “I’m glad you’re one of the nice types,” she said. “You’re a strong boy; I don’t know how I’d handle you if you got rough.” My self-esteem was restored.
“Very carefully,” I suggested. She took me at my word, and moved across me; I found myself looking up into her smiling eyes. “Mandy,” I told her, ‘fidelity has never come easy to me, and you’re making it more difficult by the second.”
“I can feel that,” she remarked.
“So please … and don’t be offended, because I’m having trouble asking this … go and sleep in the spare room.”
“No,” she said. “I’ve got my orders.”
Thirty-Seven.
I don’t know how I did it, but I made it to Advocates’ Close at the appointed hour next morning, looking reasonably fresh-faced, and feeling fit and ready for work. When the alarm woke me, at six on the dot, Mandy was up and dressed. She offered to make breakfast while I showered but I knew that the caterers would be taking care of that in the production trailers in Cockburn Street.
The location was so near at hand that I was able to walk there in only a couple of minutes.
The book says that it’s dark and raining when they find the body, but Miles had taken a liberty with that as well. If we’d shot in darkness we’d have had to spread it over at least two nights, and the cost would have shot up. As I said, the man knows the value of a pound.
Advocates’ Close was blocked off when Mandy and I got there, guarded by policemen, who were actually extras in uniform. The High Street was open to traffic, though, and a small crowd of onlookers had gathered at the barrier; some, but not all of them, were on the payroll. Once the cameras started rolling, though, all the punters would be cleared away. Continuity is everything in film; if the faces in the background changed from shot to shot, it would stick out like a sore thumb.
Speaking of which, as I eased my way through the crowd, I saw Ricky Ross standing inside the alleyway. I walked up to him, and Mandy strolled off to join the other minders. “She picked you up, then?” he asked, nodding after her.
“She never left my side,” I told him, ‘as per your orders.”
“You should be so lucky,” he muttered, sarcastically. “The Ice Maiden’s above the likes of you, son. Her job’s to collect you from your flat and get you here on time, and that’s that, so don’t you get any ideas.”
“As if I would.” I changed the subject, fast; if Mandy’s visit had been extra-curricular, I didn’t want him to get more of a sniff of it than I’d given him already. “Have your people spotted the guy who was following me?” I asked him.
“Sorry. There hasn’t been a trace. You are sure about him, are you?”
“Of course I’m fucking sure!”
“Okay, okay, keep your hair on. You’ve probably spooked him. Chances are he was just an idiot punter and you’ll never see him again, but we’ll keep looking, and I’ll keep the cover on Susie.”
“Thanks.”
For the first time, I wondered about his presence there. “Where’s Alison?” I asked.
“Still at home. I’ve got someone watching her too, though.”
“Do you really think she’s at risk?”
“I’m not taking any chances,” he said, curtly.
I caught something in his voice. “Here, Ricky,” I challenged, ‘are you getting keen on her?”
He glared at me. “I like the girl, okay?”
“Christ, it’s thanks to you she could be going to the slammer!”
“I don’t need reminding about that, thanks. Anyway, she won’t; I’ve seen who the judge is likely to be. He and I were at school together; if I speak on her behalf she’ll get probation, okay.”
I laughed loud enough to turn the heads of the minders, who were gathered in a group at the foot of the Close. “Is there anything in this bloody city,” I asked him, ‘that can’t be fixed by the power of the old school tie?”
“Cancer,” he said, cheerfully, ‘but that’s about all.”
“You won’t be so sure of yourself if the police tie her to Anna Chin.”
“They won’t. I’ve had word; they’ve got a new lead. They haven’t given up on the intruder theory, but they’re off following the scent of Anna’s boyfriend now.”
That got my attention. “Her boyfriend? But that’ll lead them straight to David Capperauld, and Alison.”
He shook his head. “Not him. He must have been on the side. She had an official boyfriend, a corporal in the Parachute Regiment. He’s on leave just now; Anna’s father told the CID they had a blazing row a few days ago.”
“Sure, about Capperauld.”
“No. That’s not what the father said, and it’s not what the soldier’s saying. Their story is that he was pressing her to give up her job and go south to live with him, and that she refused, point blank.”
“Because she was having it off with David.”
“I’m telling you; his name hasn’t come up.”
“For now,” I said, gloomily.
Behind me I heard a buzz among the punters in the crowd of onlookers. I turned, just in time to see them part, as Glen Oliver led Ewan Capperauld on to the set. I checked my watch; dead on time.
“Okay,” came a voice from the foot of the Close. “Actors to makeup,” Miles commanded. “Let’s make a movie.”
Thirty-Eight.
The wardrobe mistress gave me a brown leather jerkin for my first scene; it fitted pretty well. As far as I’d been able to tell from the book, Andy Martin rarely wore anything else. She handed me a pair of black Levi’s as well; they were my size and had been washed several times to give them a worn look. I tried to tell her that the pair I was wearing would do fine, but she pointed out that a middle-ranking Edinburgh detective would be unlikely to turn up at a murder scene wearing Gucci.
The production trailers, great articulated things, stretched halfway up Cockburn Street; two of them were split into reasonably spacious dressing rooms. I had my own on this project; a first for me, since I’d had to share with other cast members before. As Miles had promised, there were no stars on any of the doors, only our names.
Make-up didn’t take too long; all they had to do with me was to damp down what was left of my California tan, and replace it with a more authentic Edinburgh pallor. I’ll never like wearing slap, but it’s a small sacrifice for the money, and the stuff they use now is non-allergenic, unlike the make-up Jan and I wore in our drama club days, which brought me out in spots … or maybe that was just my age.
By the time we were ready, so was the crew. Miles led Ewan, Dawn and me back up the Close. The truncated dummy and the scary false head were in place, and pretty soon, so were we. The first shot was Ewan, in his Skinner coat, steel-grey hair tousled, expression grim; the camera focused tight on his eyes, then panned out, to take in the rest of the scene. I was crouching by the side of the body, and Dawn was a few feet away.
The first line of the movie was down to me, as I stood to greet him, a tired-sounding, “Morning, boss.” It was hardly deathless prose, but I did it in one take. That was it; Miles called “Cut’, as directors do, and we moved on to scene two.
As we’d been warned, most of the time was taken up by changing the camera positions; we had a lot of standing around to do, but we did it patiently. Ewan turned out to be a football fan, or at least a Falkirk supporter, the poor sad bastard. He lamented his club’s weekend defeat, and its continuing failure to build itself a ground worthy of the name.
“Why don’t you build it for them?” I suggested.
He raised an eyebrow, creasing his make-up. “Not all followers of the Bairns are completely stupid,” he replied.
Eventually, around mid-morning, Miles called a refreshment break. The weather was holding up, so there were no continuity worries on that score. I stopped in at the canteen truck, picked up a mug of coffee and a couple of BLT rolls, loaded them on to a tray, and headed back to my dressing room … if you’ve got it, flaunt it.
Awkwardly, I unlocked the door with my left hand, stepped up and inside and let it swung shut behind me, then went to set the tray down on the table, against the wall.
I only saw the thing because of the mirror, and even then, it only caught a corner of my eye. I couldn’t see what it was, but it hadn’t been there earlier, of that I was sure. At first I thought it was a leaflet, but when I slid the tray to one side, I saw that it was a photograph, an A4 computer printout, lying face up on the table-top.
I picked it up and looked at it, and as I did I felt the blood racing to my head. It was a picture of Susie, and me, pushing Janet in her pram, taken, I guessed from the steps of the Kelvingrove Museum, as we approached the Kelvin Hall.
It was my turn to go ballistic. I jerked the door open again and yelled out into Cockburn Street. “Ricky!”
It was Mandy who responded; she jumped out of the canteen wagon and ran up the hill. “He’s gone back to his office, Oz,” she said, barely out of breath. “What is it?”
“What sort of a fucking operation is this?” I snarled at her. Dawn’s dressing-room door opened as I spoke and she looked out, puzzled and curious. I grabbed Mandy by the arm and hauled her inside.
I waved the photo in her face. “Someone’s been in here,” I told her, making a conscious effort not to shout. “He’s left me a calling card. You people are supposed to be trying to trace this guy, you’re all over here, and yet he walked into this closed street, broke into my locked room and left this, and nobody stopped him.”
“Oz, I’m sorry,” she said, her face as pale as mine in my make-up. “I don’t know anything about this. What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to interrogate everyone on this crew, and I mean everyone, until you find someone who saw this guy getting in here. Then I want you to circulate his description to every one of your people. Then I want you to find the bastard and bring him to me, so that I can find out what his fucking problem is with me and my family.
“And while you’re at it, you tell that boss of yours that if this is how he protects me, then I’m starting to get seriously worried about Alison.”
I shoved the picture into her hand and stepped into the street to cool down. Miles was waiting outside. “What’s the problem, mate?” he asked.
“I’ve got a stalker,” I replied, then told him the whole story. His face grew more and more serious as I spoke. Through my still-open door I could hear Mandy on the phone to her boss.
“Don’t worry,” he said, eventually in that quiet, dangerous tone he has. “We’ll find this guy, even if I have to bring in Mark Kravitz to do it.” He slapped me on the shoulder. “Come on, let’s go down to the canteen truck and chill out.”
I followed him down the street and climbed up the steps that led into our travelling canteen. When he got to the top, he stopped in his tracks, and I heard him gasp. I stepped up beside him, and gasped just as he had. Facing us was my soon-to-be-ex-wife Primavera, and her new lover, Nicky Johnson.
“Hi,” she said, without a trace of uncertainty. “We’re passing through, on the way to Auchterarder for Nick to meet Mum and Dad.”
“Yeah,” said the former hot-dog vendor, with a greasy smile. “I couldn’t be here and not call in to wish you luck with the new movie.”
I’d never actually met the man before; I’d heard of him, seen a couple of his movies, and we’d spoken that one time, but I’d never encountered him in Los Angeles. I knew right there and then that if I had I wouldn’t have liked him, whatever the circumstances. As it was, given what had just happened in my dressing room, he couldn’t have picked a worse moment to introduce himself.
I took a pace towards him, winding up the great big left hook that I’ve honed to perfection on the heavy punching bag, and with the serious intention of knocking his head clean off his shoulders. Then I felt Miles grip my arm, hard. “No!” he shouted, stopping me in mid-stride. Nicky and the catering staff all sighed with relief; especially Nicky, who had gone pale all of a sudden.
What happened next was just a blur. Miles took half a pace forward and hit Prim’s new stud with the fastest right-hander I have ever seen in my life. Johnson’s quite a beefy bloke, but still the force of the punch spun him half round and lifted him right up on his toes. He held that position for a second, almost like a foot baller going up for a header, then pitched forward, face down, raising a small cloud of dust from the floor as he landed.
“Sorry, mate,” said Miles, over his shoulder. “I know the son-of-a-bitch was trying to rub your nose in it, but I couldn’t let you hit him. If you’d broken your hand, the delay while it healed would have cost us a fucking fortune.”
Thirty-Nine.
Nicky Johnson started crying when he came round. He was dazed and confused, and somewhere at the back of his mind, he may have realised that he had done something very stupid, which would, given Miles’s wallop, figuratively as well as fistic ally have a bad effect on his career in the long run.
Prim knelt beside him as he stirred on the floor; he was only out cold for a few seconds, and soon she had him in a sitting position with his back against the trailer wall. He looked like a big dummy sitting there, dazed, not quite knowing where he was, with two big tears tracking down his cheeks.
It put a damper on Prim’s show of outrage, as she glared up at Miles and me. “You’re a coupl
e of thugs,” she snapped. “I should call the police.”
“What did you expect?” I told her. “Whose idea was it to come here, yours or the boy’s?”
“We thought of it together,” she said. “We were in Edinburgh and it seemed the right thing to do. Dawn’s my sister, remember, and Miles is my brother-in-law. Why shouldn’t I come to visit them? It’s got nothing to do with you. You’re nothing to me now.”
I looked down at her, and I could see in her eyes that she was economising with the truth. If Susie Gantry’s taught me one thing, it’s that I’ve usually been more in love with myself than with anyone else. There have been a few exceptions to that, but Prim wasn’t one of them. I think what bound us together was luck, more than anything else. There’s no doubt about it; my life changed irrevocably from the moment we met. She was like a lucky charm to me; when she was around, at first at least, everything we touched turned to money.
We believed that we cared for each other, and we probably did, but looking back it was superficial. As a basis for a shared life, lust alone doesn’t last. We fucked a lot, Premier-League class sometimes, but we never talked about anything worth talking about. Before too long,
each of us was cheating on the other and justifying it in our own minds, until eventually, for one of the few times in my life, I got honest with myself, and went back to Jan. Even without Prim, my good-luck streak seemed to carry on, until the night when it turned very bad.
Afterwards, I turned to Prim again, maybe in the subconscious hope of restoring it… that possibility hadn’t occurred to me until that moment in the trailer, but yes, maybe I did. If that was the case, it didn’t work out. Sure, the money kept rolling in, but it was offset by black moments too. Even our wedding day had its crisis. Come to think of it, our short-lived marriage was one big crisis. As for our honeymoon… but that’s another story.
Poisoned Cherries Page 19
