Poisoned Cherries

by Quintin Jardine

  All that said, though, flawed, selfish, cynical, and ultimately doomed as a couple as we may have been, we never were ordinary. The bond that tied us might not have been true love, but whatever it was, its fabric was strong, and conductive. Sparks did fly between us, and sometimes, bolts of lightning.

  That’s how it was as we looked at each other in the canteen trailer. “I’m nothing to you, am I?” I challenged her. “So why are you looking at me that way? You don’t know whether you want to stab me or shag me, do you?”

  She jumped to her feet. “Given the choice I bloody well do!” she shouted. “Do you think I’ve forgiven you for Susie Gantry? Or forgiven her, for that matter?”

  “You think I’ve forgiven you for yours?” I heard myself snap back. Actually, I thought I had, but old Oz had been lying to himself again. “Do you want me to run through the list? Or the age range of the guys you had? Half a century wouldn’t cover it.” We glared at each other. She had forgotten Nicky; I had forgotten everyone else. “So don’t go telling me I mean nothing. I mean plenty, otherwise you wouldn’t have set up that poor sap there to see what I would do to him.” A twitch of her right eye told me I’d hit the mark. “I bet you got your jollies off him being flattened, didn’t you? I’ll bet you’re all moist now’

  She slapped me, hard, across the cheek. I laughed at her. Then I heard a shout from the door. “You two stop it! Stop it at once!” It was the first time I’d ever heard Dawn speak sharply to anyone, other than on the screen. “If you’re going to scream at each other, do it in private.”

  “Yeah,” said Miles, quietly, his calmness contrasting with his wife’s anger. “That’s a good idea. There are things you two need to get out of your system; without knocking ten bells out of each other, of course.

  Oz, you aren’t in the next couple of shots. Take time out and we’ll see you back after the lunch break.”

  “I’ve got nothing to say to this bastard,” Prim hissed.

  I had cooled off. “Well, I’ve got things to say to you. Let’s go up the hill to my dressing room.”

  Nicky Johnson was still sitting on the floor, against the wall. He made a small sound, of protest, perhaps, but everyone ignored him. My wife glared at me again, but nodded. “Okay.”

  She followed me up the hill to my trailer and stepped inside; I locked the door behind us to make sure we weren’t interrupted. “No more yelling now,” I warned her. “You don’t want to disturb Ewan Capperauld, if you haven’t already.”

  “Don’t you bet on it,” she snorted. “After what you just said.”

  I felt my cheek; it was still stinging. “I was right, then; Nicky getting belted over you did give you a wee thrill.”

  “No it did not!”

  “Then why did you bring him here? You must have known it was on the cards.”

  “You promised me you wouldn’t touch him.”

  “Since when did you and I start keeping promises to each other? You just wanted to see what would happen, didn’t you?”

  “What sort of a bloody nerve have you got?” she gasped.

  Time for a change of tack, Osbert. “Sorry,” I murmured.

  She blinked. “I said. “What…” ‘

  “I heard you the first time, and I said “Sorry”. I want to apologise properly for what happened with Susie. I’ve never really done that, and I should.”

  “Apology noted,” she murmured, ‘even if I can’t accept it, in the circumstances. And I’m not apologising, for any of what I did; I was more than entitled.”

  “Not quite,” I pointed out. “Not even in the eyes of today’s liberal matrimonial courts do two wrongs make a right. Plus, when you decided to get even with me for Susie, you did it with a married bloke. So neither of us.is innocent.”

  “So, are you just doing it to ease your conscience; telling me that you’re sorry you slept with Susie?”

  “I don’t have a conscience over that.”

  “Your cock certainly doesn’t have one.”

  “True, and I should have got my terminology right too; apologising doesn’t always mean you’re sorry. I’d have wound up sleeping with

  Susie sooner or later, so I’m not sorry about that. It’s just that my timing was a bit off; that was wrong.”

  “That’s about as clumsy as you can get, but at least it’s more honest than usual.” She ventured a grim smile.

  “I’m trying, really. You should, too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you and that lump of nothing back there, that Nicky. What the hell are you doing with him?”

  “I’m in lo…” she began, until my exploding laugh cut her short.

  “Stop. Don’t be daft. You’re no more in love with him than you were with me, in fact probably less; he’s a prat and he’s not worth your time. You know that. Come on, honest up; you got involved with him because you weren’t finished punishing me. Yes or no.”

  She pursed her lips. “Maybe,” she muttered.

  “From you, that’s a yes. Tell me, did you expect me to come flying down to Mexico, bop the boy there, and take you back with me?”

  She looked at me again; her eyes widened, then narrowed as if she was about to start shouting again, then went back to normal. “If I did, then I was a bloody fool, wasn’t I,” she said, grimly.

  “You didn’t know then that Susie was pregnant, though, did you?”

  I’ve seen Prim in many states, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen her look as totally stunned as she did then. Her mouth fell open and she gasped, then she sat down hard on the chair by my table, and started to cry. “Oh hell,” I heard myself whisper. “You never knew at all, did you?”

  I put my hands on her shoulder, raised her to her feet, and held her to me. “Oh, love, I really am sorry about that,” I murmured into her ear. “I assumed that Dawn would have told you.”

  I felt her shake her head against my chest. “No, she didn’t,” she mumbled. Then she pushed herself away from me. “But you should have told me.”

  “Primavera, I can’t remember when we stopped telling each other things; maybe we never started. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know what to do about Susie, even though she wasn’t making any demands of me. When you ran off with Johnson, that helped me make my mind up.”

  “And the baby?” she asked. “Is it born yet?”

  “We have a daughter.”

  She sniffled. “I really messed up with Nicky, then, didn’t I.”

  “Both times. I should feel sorry for him, but he’s such a creep … and he’s a fucking awful actor as well.”

  Her face was blotchy and a bit crumpled; yet it gave her smile a fetching, vulnerable quality that I’d never seen before. “You’re so great, are you?” she teased.

  “Better than him. If I wasn’t I’d go back to the investigating business.”

  “Maybe you should. Maybe all this isn’t really for you; maybe you should go back to being the old Oz Blackstone.”

  “Whoever the hell he was?” I grunted. “No, make no mistake, love. On balance I like being rich and famous; I admit I’d settle for being just rich, but if I have to I’ll take both.”

  “But it’s made you different.”

  “What’s wrong with different?”

  “You were never scary before; you were always nice.”

  “I’ve told you before; nice was a front. Anyway, you were always nice too; if what you say is true, you’ve changed as much as me. When I met you I thought you were Mother Teresa; then you started acting like the village slapper.”

  “That’s the effect you have on a girl when you dump her, my love. Anyway, I wasn’t that bad…” She chuckled. “Not all of the time.”

  There was a box of tissues on the table. I pulled a couple out and dried the tears from her face. “What are you going to do about that poor sod down there?” I asked her.

  “God, I don’t know.”

  “Tell me the truth now. Whose idea was it to come over here? Yours or his?”


  She smiled again; this time she looked like a kid who’d been caught doing something naughty. “Mine,” she admitted. “I booked the trip to Perthshire. When I suggested to Nicky that we should call in here to wish the new movie luck, he jumped at the chance. I reckon he thought it would get him back into Miles’s good books.”

  “Well he knows different now. Come on, Prim, you can’t take that guy to meet your folks; he’s worse than Steve Miller, that car salesman you had it off with.”

  When she snorted, cute wee laugh lines that I’d never noticed before creased up around her eyes. “No, he’s not,” she protested. “No one was worse than him! But you’re right; I’ve been going off Nicky for a while. I only brought him over here to flaunt him in front of you.

  I didn’t think you would hit him, though … and I expected even less that Miles would do it for you.”

  “That’s what friends are for.”

  “You and Miles are two of the biggest chauvinist pigs I’ve ever met.”

  “Oink,” I said. “But admit it, you love us for it.”

  She looked up at me; her eyes were clear again. “I don’t know what to call it; you are an infuriating bastard and I should hate you till the day I die, but you do have an effect on me.” She slid her arms around my waist. “What am I going to do, Oz?”

  “About Nicky? Own up, tell him you don’t love him any more and put him on a plane back to the States.”

  “I’d worked that out for myself. No, what am I going to do about me?”

  “Go and see your folks for a while. Get your head together, then decide. Whatever you want to do, you can. Money’s no object.”

  “I can’t go back to Los Angeles. I hate the place; I felt safer when I worked in Africa, and there was a war on there.”

  “So go back there. Or be Mother Teresa again; go to Calcutta and work with the poor.”

  “I’m no saint; besides, I prefer the rich.”

  “Go to the south of France then; go back to Spain.”

  “Come with me?” She said it tentatively.

  “Now that would be crazy’ In spite of myself, I felt sparks begin to fly. “There’s no such thing as third time lucky. We’d end up killing each other.”

  “I’d behave.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “What if I withdraw from our divorce agreement?”

  “Now I know you’re joking. Even you must realise that whatever else we’re good at, we’re lousy at marriage.”

  She ran her hand up inside my shirt; I felt its warmth on my chest. “There is one thing we’re very good at.” She pulled my head down and kissed me; I kissed her back … out of sheer habit, of course.

  “Yes, but…” I said when we came up for air.

  “What?”

  “Susie.”

  “She did it to me; I’d do it to her in a minute.” When she grinned at me, and those extra sparks flew, I thought I’d had it. “Although, I’d really take much longer than that.”

  There was a sofa thing against the far wall of the dressing room; it was well long enough for us. I looked at it and saw us there; so did she, and pulled me towards it. Then all the lies and deceit, mine and hers, that had driven us apart, came back to me. And something else too.

  “I can’t,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t. There’s someone else involved now.”

  “Who?” she asked. “Let me guess; that big blond goddess who let us into the canteen truck and who went running when you shouted.”

  “Close, but no cigar. No, her name’s Janet, and she’s two weeks old. She changes everything.”

  She took her arms from around me. “I see. So that’s what I should have done to keep us together, is it? Had a baby with you?”

  “No. What we should have done was build a relationship on the rocks of truth, not the sands of deceit.” I tried to smile as I said it, but fell short.

  “Jesus,” Prim exclaimed, ‘have you got a scriptwriter now?”

  “No, that trite double metaphor was all my own.”

  “Thank God; I’d hate to think a professional came up with it. So what are you telling me; that you and Susie are building your thing on the basis of a kid? Because there are millions of examples to show that that doesn’t work.”

  “I don’t know what I’m telling you. I don’t know, period. I think I do, and then something will happen to make me uncertain again.”

  “Like me turning up out of the blue?”

  “Yes. No. Fuck.”

  She smiled at me again; but with real warmth this time. I couldn’t remember the last time she’d looked at me that way. “My darling, those three words encompass your entire approach to life, and mine. Susie’s wrong for you; she’s much too complicated.”

  I sat on the couch and pulled her down beside me; all of a sudden I was dead tired. She put her head on my shoulder. “You may be right, Prim; you may well be. But you’ve got to let me work that out for myself, not try to persuade me.

  “Last time you came back into my life it led to all sorts of disasters for us both. Having you do it again scares me a wee bit… no, scares me a lot. So please, you do what you have to do to get rid of lover-boy, go see your Mum and Dad, and let me get on with making my movie and with sorting myself out.”

  She nodded. “Okay,” she whispered, then she drew me round and kissed me; again, I kissed her back, but not out of habit this time.

  Finally, she stood. “I’d better leave now,” she murmured.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But before you go…”

  She looked at me with a mixture of surprise and expectation. “Yes?”

  “You’d better take some of those tissues and wipe my make-up off your face, otherwise People Will Talk, even more than they’re going to already.”

  Forty.

  I was bugger all use for the rest of the day; I fluffed a couple of simple lines and tried even Miles’s patience, but somehow or other I got through it without too much embarrassment.

  Mandy was waiting outside my dressing room when I got back down to Cockburn Street at the end of it all. “It’s not like you to let a locked door bother you,” I said grimly. “Come to think of it, it’s not like anyone around here.”

  “Shh!” she whispered, urgently. “Ricky’s back. He’s in the catering van and the door’s open; he might hear you.”

  “I might tell him all the same,” I grunted, but I didn’t mean it. It had been a bad enough day as it was and if I dropped Mandy in it by telling her boss about her surprise visit, I’d just make myself look even dafter, not to mention getting her fired. As I opened the door, her look told me she didn’t believe my threat anyway.

  “Has my wife gone?” I asked her.

  Her mouth fell open and stayed like that, for a good few seconds. “Your wife?” she exclaimed, at last.

  “Primavera. The woman who visited the set at the lunch break.”

  “She told me she was Dawn’s sister.”

  “She is; she’s also my wife. But we’re getting divorced.”

  “I’m not surprised.” she said, with a snorting laugh. “I thought I’d been fully briefed about you, but Ricky left that bit out.”

  “It wasn’t relevant. Has she gone, do you know?”

  Mandy nodded. “Yes, about half an hour ago.”

  “What about the guy she was with?”

  “Nicky Johnson?” She surprised me by looking star-struck; there she was working with three of the biggest name actors in the world in Miles, Dawn and Ewan, but it took his name to make her eyes go dreamy. No accounting for tastes, is there? Just as well she hadn’t been there when Miles decked him; she might have leapt to his defence. “He left before her. They had a big argument, and I heard

  Gail Driver booking him on the next London flight.” She shook her head. “More fool your missus.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” I muttered. “But she’s well shot of that clown.”

  Mandy looked at me as a nun might have looked at a heretic.


  “Come on,” I said, ‘back to business. What have you got to tell me about the guy who left that photo for me?”

  “Nothing much. I did find a catering worker who saw a man near this van, but she didn’t see him break in or anything. He was just standing there, leaning against the wall smoking a cigarette.”

  “Description?”

  “He was wearing a hard hat and an orange donkey jacket. There’s a shop being refurbished up the road; they’re working seven days a week and that’s what the builders wear. He was probably just a joiner having a smoke.”

  “Nevertheless, did she notice anything else?”

  “He was around six feet tall, he had a beard, and he was wearing flashy wrap-round sunglasses.”

  “A joiner in Raybans? Did anyone think to go and see if any of the guys working on the site fit that description?”

  Mandy gave her lip a quick nibble. “No,” she murmured. “We’ll do it tomorrow; they’ll have knocked off for the day by now.”

  “A waste of time,” said a voice from the door; I turned to see Ricky climbing into my room. “If that was your guy, he’s not going to be back. If it wasn’t… so bloody what?”

  He had a point. “So what’s he up to?” I asked. “Why pull a stunt like that?”

  “I don’t know, Oz. It could just be a nutter; that’s the likeliest explanation, in fact.”

  “But what if it isn’t? In my experience the likeliest explanation hardly ever turns out to be right.”

  Ross took a deep breath. “Mine too,” he admitted. “In that case, this could be leading up to an extortion attempt. You might get a letter, threatening Susie and the baby, and demanding a pay-off. The photo, the way it was taken and the way it was planted, could all be an attempt to scare you into paying up.”

  “What about a kidnap attempt?”

  “Not a chance; the guy would have done that already, or tried it, if it was on his agenda. Let’s assume he isn’t a nutter and he isn’t stupid; he’ll know that Susie’s protected.”